Brazil Presses Abbott to Cut AIDS Drug Prices (Update1)

[struggle4progress]

Aug. 18 (Bloomberg) -- Brazil, the Latin American country with the largest HIV-infected population, is pressuring Abbott Laboratories to reduce prices of AIDS treatment Kaletra for the second time in a month, saying the government can make it for 59 percent less.

The country, as part of a decade-long fight to lower drug costs, reached an agreement with Abbott to reduce Kaletra's per- pill price to 99 cents from $1.17 on July 8. Three days later, President Luiz Inacio Lula da Silva named a new health minister, Saraiva Felipe, who demanded a bigger reduction. The government says it will manufacture the drug at a cost of 41 cents a pill if the fourth-largest U.S. drugmaker refuses.

The threat has prompted Abbott to delay plans to invest $27 million remodeling a plant in Brazil, a company spokeswoman said. U.S. Representative Mark Steven Kirk, a Republican from the district where the Abbott Park, Illinois-based company is located, said he would respond to a violation of Abbott's patent by proposing legislation to cancel trade preferences for $2 billion of Brazilian exports. <snip>

Brazil supplies drugs for free to as many as 163,000 victims of AIDS and HIV, the retrovirus that causes the disease. An estimated 23,400 people in Brazil use Kaletra, making it the drug's biggest market outside the developed world, Lotrowska said in a telephone interview from Sao Paulo. <snip>

http://www.bloomberg.com/apps/news?pid=10000086&sid=akUPDkm27vC8&refer=latin_america

[oscar111]

1. profits 17%: but only 3% for Fortune 500 on average

BIG PILL ... aka BP... gets seventeen percent profits, over five times the big corporation average.

So do not believe the excuse "hi prices are to cover our strain to pay for research on new pills"

they are not straining to get research money. They have 17 percent after paying for the piddling research they do. Most new drug research is in taxpayer funded universities. BP just reads the journals for results.

source: former NEJM editor.. think her name is Snow. Has a new book out. New England Journal of Medicine, the premier journal.

Why have patents? Holland pays/paid {read this 20 yrs ago} creative types a salary - guaranteed for life, like teacher tenure idea. Pays writers, artists and perhaps also ?? inventors.

They get security instead of the current US model of millions of artists starve, while one hits it big and buys a 747 jetliner for himself.

With the Dutch model, inventive scientists in the pill field would be on salary, and no patents needed. All the outrageous effects of patents would disappear, and Brazilians would have no pill problems. Nor would Africans with similar pill problems.

[oscar111]

2. RECOMMEND FOR GREATEST page: butt at bott of OP