Showing posts with label prescription drug prices. Show all posts
Showing posts with label prescription drug prices. Show all posts

Monday, December 30, 2013

India’s Efforts to Aid Poor Worry Drug Makers

India has almost no choice but to over-ride drug patents. $18,000 for one course of breast cancer-fighting treatment is like 10 Lakh Rupees. Even when some drugs are priced at $140 per month, that still comes out to over Rps 8,000. These are astronomical sums for poor people.

Alka Kudesia's story is heart-breaking, and it's no surprise that pharmaceutical companies are worried by an Indian drug company's plan to begin manufacturing a generic version of Herceptin.

As it stands now, about 23,000 Indian women need Herceptin, but they cannot get it.

Dr. Peter Bach's comment is smug, insensitive, and not entirely true. There's always been pressure on highly profitable pharmaceutical companies to stop exploiting the sick and frail. Among African countries, there have been pressures for Big Pharma to lower drug prices. That India forsakes begging for lower drug prices and opts instead to over-ride patents reflects how pharmaceutical companies wrongly put profits over people.

Maybe India can over-ride many other patents and set up new drug factories -- and be the change we need to see in revolutionizing global access to live-saving medications ? Crowd source it, maybe you might find helpers.

Tuesday, December 6, 2011

Rev. Jesse Jackson Attends #OWS Healthcare for the 99% Meeting

Jesse-Jackson-attends-OWS-Healthcare-for-the-99-per-cent-meeting-Dec-04-2011-NYC, The Rev. Jesse Jackson attends an #OccupyWallStreet meeting of the Healthcare for the 99 per cent. Working Group at Liberty Square (fka Zuccotti Park) in New York City on December 4, 2011. Photo copyright 2011 by Louis Flores. All Rights Reserved.

The Rev. Jesse Jackson attends an #OccupyWallStreet meeting of the Healthcare for the 99 per cent. Working Group at Liberty Square (f/k/a Zuccotti Park) in New York City on December 4, 2011.

The civil rights activist Rev. Jesse Jackson joined the regular weekly meeting of the the Healthcare for the 99 per cent. Working Group of #OccupyWallStreet in New York last Sunday.

At the meeting, the Rev. Jackson spoke about the "exorbitant, exploitative cost of medicine." The Rev. Jackson also spoke about how the issue of healthcare access and affordability has motivated many of the hundreds of thousands of members of the 1199SEIU union to want to become part of the #OccupyWallStreet movement.

The Rev. Jackson discussed how many of the "victims" of the broken healthcare system are absent from the #OccupyWallStreet movement, and he said it was the task of the movement to find a way to motivate them to participate.

Other economic issues that the Rev. Jackson said that the disenfranchised faced were incarceration, joblessness, home foreclosures, and high amounts of student loan and credit card debt. The Rev. Jackson asked members of the working group to consider whether the disenfranchised "occupied" where they are, or whether the disenfranchised needed a physical location in order to occupy. "Is occupy a place or a space ?" The Rev. Jackson made the point that location did not define the new social movement's constituents. He added, "Those are you patients and your friends."

One day after the Rev. Jackson attended a Liberty Square meeting of the Healthcare for the 99 per cent. Working Group, the Rev. Jackson published an op-ed in the Chicago Sun-Times entitled, "Cost of broken health care system is killing us."