This post is pathetically ill-informed. (Its also morally offensive - more dead people is good for developing countries, Salvance, really?) It would indeed be a good idea for drug companies to lower their prices in developing countries. There's just one problem with that, as anyone with any experience in the area can tell you. The companies refuse, and delay, and lie, and raise their prices again as soon as someone isn't looking. AIDS activists and aid agencies have spent years working for price reductions, and you know what they learned? The only thing that consistently reduces drug prices is generic competition. If the market is your god, you too should understand the value of competition. If you're still not persuaded, look at some of the documentation produced by the Access to Medicines Campaign at Doctors Without Borders. www.accessmed-msf.org. Or are facts too much to bother with?
Stay with me here, now is the part where you have to pay attention. All low and middle income countries are about 7 percent of the world's drug market. Companies can write off all profits in these countries with no real dent in their bottom line. And it won't hurt incentives for research, because -- newsflash -- there aren't any to speak of. We haven't seen a new TB drug in 20 years because drug companies won't make drugs for 7% of the market. This amount of money is a blip to them, compared to what they can make with a cream that could put hair back on the head of the millions of Malthusians in the United States.
So how will this proposal hurt innovation? Answer: It won't. How will it help save lives? By reducing drug prices in developing countries. Should you support it? Yes.
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Stay with me here, now is the part where you have to pay attention. All low and middle income countries are about 7 percent of the world's drug market. Companies can write off all profits in these countries with no real dent in their bottom line. And it won't hurt incentives for research, because -- newsflash -- there aren't any to speak of. We haven't seen a new TB drug in 20 years because drug companies won't make drugs for 7% of the market. This amount of money is a blip to them, compared to what they can make with a cream that could put hair back on the head of the millions of Malthusians in the United States. So how will this proposal hurt innovation? Answer: It won't. How will it help save lives? By reducing drug prices in developing countries. Should you support it? Yes.