Two sides of the same tablet.

US annoyed because rich country won’t buy expensive American drugs.
US annoyed because poor countries can’t afford to buy expensive American drugs.

The cost of drugs is a bit of a tricky question, because someone does have to foot the bill for developing the things; advanced cures for cancer don’t invent themselves. Governments have much more important things to do than financing research into saving lives, things like financing research into ever bigger and scarier ways of killing people in morally dubious wars. So it’s only natural to feel sympathy for the beleaguered CEOs of multinational pharmaceutical companies charged with the responsibility of creating tomorrow’s medicines. It must be a tough job. I’m not sure the ten-figure wage slip could ever compensate for the pressure.

There isn’t an easy fix to this problem because it’s just part of the overall mess of inequality and opportunism that is business-as-usual. I don’t think that toppling the oppressive capitalist hierarchy and trying to build a collectivist healthcare utopia is going to do anything useful, people would just game that system too. I do have a sneaking suspicion, however, that the angle being pursued by the US deputy health secretary is not going to fix anything for anyone other than the aforementioned CEOs and their shareholders.

Something occurs in passing: perhaps the White House thinks that following the loss of the US Congress to the Democrats it must resort to ordering UK politicians about, as they’re the only people left in power who are credulous enough to swallow their nasty little ideas. I hope Labour’s ministers have enough residual shreds of self-respect left to tell them where to get off.

1 comment 2006-11-14 16:39 Categories: Day Job