How Can "Trade" Rules Impact Medicare & Medicaid, making drugs more expensive?

[OrwellwasRight]

I know there are many New Dems on this board who refuse to accept the data about the links between neoliberal style trade rules and depressed wages for US workers, but maybe this'll get your attention. Even neoliberals shouldn't want a corporate thumb on the scale of drug pricing decisions in government health programs, right?

Take a look at this:

AFL-CIO Joins Broad Coalition to Fight for Affordable Medicines

Yesterday, the AFL-CIO’s own Thea Lee joined AARP, Doctors Without Borders, Oxfam America and the Generic Pharmaceutical Association in urging President Obama to fix proposals in the Trans-Pacific Partnership (TPP)—a trade and economic governance deal currently under negotiation—that could leave us all paying more for life-saving prescription medicines.

One of the most harmful of the provisions Lee warned against including in the TPP was part of the U.S.-Korea FTA. It gives companies that make drugs or medical devices special rights—over and above those they already have under domestic law—to appeal government decisions about whether to include a drug or device in a government health program (such as Medicare) and how much to pay for it.

Public health advocates, doctors and patients don’t receive similar rights—they aren’t even mentioned in these provisions. No trade agreement should “stack the deck” toward higher prices for life-saving drugs and devices. Yet the U.S.-Korea FTA does, and the TPP might do the same. America’s working people can’t afford unnecessary price increases for pharmaceutical products—to say nothing of our brothers and sisters in developing countries.

Another potentially harmful provision reportedly included in the draft TPP is patent protection so extreme it will lead to “evergreening” (indefinite perpetuation) of medicinal patents, thus preventing price competition from generic drugs. The AFL-CIO has a long history of supporting intellectual property rights—after all, workers in creative and innovative fields rely on intellectual property protection to support their pay and benefits. But extreme patent protections (like rules requiring a new 20-year patent term every time the drug changes from liquid to pill to capsule, or rules that prevent people from challenging the validity of a patent) are unnecessary and can put our families’ health at risk. That’s just wrong. Such rules hurt patients and simply shouldn’t be in international trade deals.

Read the rest of the blog post (complete with explanatory hyperlinks) here: http://www.aflcio.org/Blog/Political-Action-Legislation/AFL-CIO-Joins-Broad-Coalition-to-Fight-for-Affordable-Medicines

In essence, the Obama Administration is doing the bidding of big PhRMA in its trade policy. To be fair, the Obama Administration didn't make up the idea of putting these ideas in trade deals, but it is certainly continuing them wholeheartedly. In fact, if the Administration gets what it wants in the TPP deal, it's medicinal provisions will be WORSE than the ones Bush negotiated for the US-Peru deal in the famous "May 10" deal brokered by House Democrats. For more on "May 10", go here: http://policy-practice.oxfamamerica.org/work/trade/intellectual-property-and-access-to-medicine/

This is a historic alliance: labor, business, an anti-poverty group, a global health group, and the AARP. It means there really is a problem with the TPP and people need to stop turning a blind eye.

There is a petition on the AFL-CIO site that you can sign. I would encourage you to do so -- and more importantly, to write or call your Member of Congress and give him or her a piece of your mind about this. It is NOT OK to increase profits for PhRMA by bankrupting public healthcare systems and keeping generics off the market forever.

[NightWatcher]

1. When they want to jack up prices they'll just create a shortage and then slowly start making it back

I am on a medication that before September cost me (no insurance, cash pay) $28 bucks a month for 60 pills. In October there was a shortage as the five companies that make it abruptly stopped. In November when two of the companies started making it again in cost $285 for the same number of pills. This was for an old, cheap medicine (Plaquenil's generic, hydrochloroquine).

Last year the same happened when my oral weekly chemo med went from $25 to $92 in one month.

It really should be criminal.

Personal note: I will have insurance as of Jan 1 and my total bill for insurance and pharmaceuticals co pay will be less than the one drug costs me now.

[OrwellwasRight]

2. Glad to hear you will soon have insurance.

PhRMA is evil. No one should be making a profit on someone's sickness. To me, it's just immoral.

Neither should our government do the bidding of PhRMA so they can jack up prices in places like Vietnam and Peru -- or to try to squeeze more money out of states through Medicaid.

[NightWatcher]

3. I didn't mean to threadjack you but most peopel never see the real face of Big Pharma

until they're sick for a couple of years.

That they can willy nilly jerk people around on something as serious for many, like life saving drugs, is just immoral. What kills me too is how the sales reps get ahead of me in line to see my Doc and are always trying to get her to push something new and more expensive (and often worse for you) down your throat. I flipped my Doc's mind when she went to renew my pain meds and muscle relaxer recently and I told her that I had started smoking cannabis on a regular basis and it was helping my pain and inflammation a ton. FWIW, my drug dealer would get shot (not by me) if he tried to raise his rates like Big Pharma does.

[Hoyt]

4. Appeal rights don't bother me. It's easy to say No to an appeal, the government does it all the time

If a drug company, changes the formula a little to increase cost and patents, a good health plan will say no -- we'll require our patients to take the old, cheaper generic two a day drug, rather than the single time released drug at 10 times the cost. Of course, as soon as the health plan does that to save money and minimize premiums, patients and consumer groups will raise holy hell.

As it is now, Medicare hardly ever says no to a drug or device that is FDA approved. The only ones saying No, are Medicare Advantage Plans. And, dang, if people right here don't rail against those plans that 30% of Medicare beneficiaries choose to save money and get coordinated care.

Sometimes, I think we are just doomed.

[OrwellwasRight]

5. It's about setting up rules that can delay generic competition indefinitely . . .

And making it so we can't change those rules under our domestic law because now we'd be bound to them by a trade agreement.

It's also about, when foreign drug companies don't like the answers they get from a Medicaid or Medicare appeal, giving them the right to sue our government before private, unaccountable "corporate courts" that don't use US law and where decisions can't be appealed.

And more importantly, it's about exporting the power of PhRMA to developing countries - which means countries with huge HIV rates won't be able to afford to give their citizens HIV drugs because the trade agreement prevents their use of generics.

Even if you don't give a shit about any of this, can you explain to me why an international trade agreement is the right place to make these rules? Shouldn't these rules be under domestic control of a country's citizens, not set at the international level? Citizens don't get to vote for trade agreements and citizens can't vote to change their rules when they decide the rules aren't working. Why aren't rules about intellectual property, how Medicare sets drug prices, and what legal rights corporations will have made like any other law that goes through Congress, out in the open where we can see them?

[Hoyt]

6. Because we don't make all the drugs, and our Medicare rules are out in the open.

You can read every one of them in detail in the Federal Register. You can even comment on them.

[OrwellwasRight]

7. Yeah, and . . . .?

How does that save us from ISDS lawsuits by foreign drug makers? How does that have anything to do with setting new patent standards that allow evergreening? How does that make it OK to restrict drug patent and pricing policy through trade agreements? Your answer doesn't make sense.