Like everyone else in the U.S. and beyond, access to medicines advocates are trying to figure out just what the impact will be from last week’s surprising election results.
No one knows for sure, but it seems there is some bad news and some good news, and plenty of activism opportunities ahead...
Does the upcoming U.S. election matter to the cause of access to medicines?
The correct answer is “Yes, but . . .”
The answer is yes, because the U.S. President and members of Congress are enormously influential on access to medicines policy. Clearly, this is true in the U.S., with the prospect of potential changes in 2017 to Medicare drug pricing and discounts to governments on drugs discovered with taxpayer dollars.
Have you heard the old saying that, if you look around a poker table and can’t figure out who is the sucker, then the sucker is you?
When it comes to the current medicines system, it is time for us taxpayers to take a good look: we are the suckers in this game. Taxpayers pay for the research to discover medicines we need, which is great. What is not great is that we then hand over monopoly rights to those medicines to corporations, which turn around and charge us taxpayers and our governments sky-high prices for the very same medicines we paid to discover.
Enormous public frustration with the skyrocketing prices of essential medicines in the US has not yet led to any meaningful reform. But a historic initiative on the November ballot in California, championed by health care and consumer advocates and fiercely opposed by multinational drug corporations, may finally rein in Big Pharma.