Healthy Skepticism Library item: 343

Warning: This library includes all items relevant to health product marketing that we are aware of regardless of quality. Often we do not agree with all or part of the contents.

Publication type: news

Bradley M.
Drug prices will rocket, experts warn
Sydney Morning Herald 2004 May 20

Full text:

The free trade agreement will add at least 30 per cent to the cost of prescription drugs and should be scrapped, says a group of Australian experts on pharmaceutical policy and intellectual property law.

In a submission to the Senate select committee on the agreement, the group says US drug companies will have far greater market power under the deal, due to clauses relating to the expiry of patents being left vague and ambiguous.

Dr Thomas Faunce, a lecturer at the Australian National University and one of those who wrote the submission, said it “allows the lawyers of pharmaceutical companies to spin out the litigation and discourage and inhibit the production of cheaper generic drugs”.

“What we are losing in the pharmaceutical benefits area is so great and so deleterious to Australia, that it warrants the whole deal not going ahead,” he said.

The group estimates the agreement would have added more than $1.5 billion to the cost of the Pharmaceutical Benefits Scheme if it had been in effect throughout 2003.

A spokeswoman for the Federal Department of Health dismissed the group’s findings and reiterated the Government’s position that the FTA will not affect the price of medications in Australia.

She said the experts’ submission was “based on assumptions not backed up by the text of the agreement”.