Today many of the medicines that enter the market, such as new cancer or Hepatitis C treatments, reach exorbitant and unjustified prices, which have made the diseases profitable businesses. Our public health coverage will no longer be able to sustain drug funding at these high prices, which are nevertheless necessary for thousands of sick people.
The It’s not Healthy and Price of Life campaigns have come together to remind the Minister of Health that when it comes to health, it cannot be the market that sets the conditions. In particular, we ask you to use all legal and political means at your disposal to drastically reduce the price of innovative drugs and to introduce transparency measures throughout the medical R&D funding process. We also remind you that the State’s General Budgets are not in a position to assume unlimited financing of these treatments at the cost the pharmaceutical companies ask for to acquire them. All of them are collected in an online petition that you can sign here.
This is a far-reaching issue: ensuring the economic sustainability and efficiency of the Spanish public health system, key to enjoying a true state of well-being. Within Spanish health expenditure the largest proportion is that for pharmaceutical (hospital and prescription) spending, a line that has increased significantly since 2012. The paradox is that while austerity policies have led to significant reduction in public health spending, pharmaceutical spending has continued to increase sharply.
One of the most recent experiences, such as Hepatitis C, has shown that the very high prices of these novel treatments were forcing administrations to limit the number of patients who could receive them to those who were they were in a very advanced stages of the disease, or to devote huge amounts of their budgets to meeting the economic demands of pharmaceutical companies; something that should not be repeated again.
The European Parliament supports the denunciation of social organizations
The petition launces in a key week in which the European Parliament has recognized that high-price politics are unsustainable and that any public investment in R&D must lead to a social returns. In this regard, it envisages the need to share data and results of publicly funded research and to know in detail the configuration of drug prices. This euro-parliamentary position agrees with the approaches promoted in recent years by European civil society organizations and with the organizers of the two campaigns.
Now national governments, particularly the Spanish government, must step forward and take on the recommendations of Parliament and other processes such as the United Nations Stop Panel on Innovation and Access to Medicines as their own. The It’s not Healthy and the Price of Life campaigns share the objective of promoting a real commitment to transform the pricing system of the medicines that cure, the prioritization of the criterion for the common good and universal right to health. They bet on a model where the State assumes its responsibility to protect public interests over industrial ones, with the introduction of greater transparency in medical research spending; and the construction of an alternative model for patents to encourage research and development of truly innovative treatments.
