The issue of how patents impact medicine has increased in significance within the last decade. The book provides an explanation of the current international infrastructure and explains how competing patent perspectives play a thus far unacknowledged role in promoting distortion and confusion.

Thanks to remarkable advances in modern health care attributable to science, engineering, and medicine, it is now possible to cure or manage illnesses that were long deemed untreatable. At the same time, however, the United States is facing the vexing challenge of a seemingly uncontrolled rise in the cost of health care. Total medical expenditures are rapidly approaching 20 percent of the gross domestic product and are crowding out other priorities of national importance. The use of increasingly expensive prescription drugs is a significant part of this problem, making the cost of biopharmaceuticals a serious national concern with broad political implications. Especially with the highly visible and very large price increases for prescription drugs that have occurred in recent years, finding a way to make prescription medicinesâ€"and health care at largeâ€"more affordable for everyone has become a socioeconomic imperative. Affordability is a complex function of factors, including not just the prices of the drugs themselves, but also the details of an individual's insurance coverage and the number of medical conditions that an individual or family confronts. Therefore, any solution to the affordability issue will require considering all of these factors together. The current high and increasing costs of prescription drugsâ€"coupled with the broader trends in overall health care costsâ€"is unsustainable to society as a whole. Making Medicines Affordable examines patient access to affordable and effective therapies, with emphasis on drug pricing, inflation in the cost of drugs, and insurance design. This report explores structural and policy factors influencing drug pricing, drug access programs, the emerging role of comparative effectiveness assessments in payment policies, changing finances of medical practice with regard to drug costs and reimbursement, and measures to prevent drug shortages and foster continued innovation in drug development. It makes recommendations for policy actions that could address drug price trends, improve patient access to affordable and effective treatments, and encourage innovations that address significant needs in health care.

Access to medicine is a topic of widespread interest. However, some issues that impact such access are presently inadequately understood. In particular, international laws require most nations to provide patents on drugs, resulting in premium prices that limit access. In Access to Medicine in the Global Economy, Professor Cynthia Ho explains such laws and their impact for a diverse group of readers, from scholars and policy makers to students in a variety of disciplines. This book explains and interprets important international agreements, beginning with the landmark Agreement on Trade Related Aspects of Intellectual Property (TRIPS), but also including more recent free trade agreements and the pending Anti-Counterfeiting Trade Agreement (ACTA). Professor Ho addresses controversial topics, such as when a nation can provide a compulsory license, as well as whether a nation may suspend in-transit generic goods. The book also discusses how patent-like rights (such as "data exclusivity") prevent lower-cost generic medicines from entering into the marketplace and provides strategies for minimizing the harm of such rights. Clear explanations and diagrams, frequently asked questions, and case studies make these topics accessible to any reader. The case studies also provide a theory of patent perspectives that helps explain why access to medicine, though a universal goal, remains elusive in practice. The book aims to provide an important first step toward eventual workable solutions by promoting a better understanding of existing and future laws that impact access to medicine.

In 2015, building on the advances of the Millennium Development Goals, the United Nations adopted Sustainable Development Goals that include an explicit commitment to achieve universal health coverage by 2030. However, enormous gaps remain between what is achievable in human health and where global health stands today, and progress has been both incomplete and unevenly distributed. In order to meet this goal, a deliberate and comprehensive effort is needed to improve the quality of health care services globally. Crossing the Global Quality Chasm: Improving Health Care Worldwide focuses on one particular shortfall in health care affecting global populations: defects in the quality of care. This study reviews the available evidence on the quality of care worldwide and makes recommendations to improve health care quality globally while expanding access to preventive and therapeutic services, with a focus in low-resource areas. Crossing the Global Quality Chasm emphasizes the organization and delivery of safe and effective care at the patient/provider interface. This study explores issues of access to services and commodities, effectiveness, safety, efficiency, and equity. Focusing on front line service delivery that can directly impact health outcomes for individuals and populations, this book will be an essential guide for key stakeholders, governments, donors, health systems, and others involved in health care.

This study has emerged from an ongoing program of trilateral cooperation between WHO, WTO and WIPO. It responds to an increasing demand, particularly in developing countries, for strengthened capacity for informed policy-making in areas of intersection between health, trade and IP, focusing on access to and innovation of medicines and other medical technologies.

With the launch of the World Trade Organization (WTO) in 1995, its Agreement on Trade-Related Aspects of Intellectual Property Rights (TRIPS) emerged as a symbol of coercion in international economic relations. In the decade that followed, intellectual property became one of the most contentious topics of global policy debate. This book is the first full-length study of the politics surrounding what developing countries did to implement TRIPS and why. Based on a review of the evidence from 1995 to 2007, this book emphasises that developing countries exhibited considerable variation in their approach to TRIPS implementation. In particular, developing countries took varying degrees of advantage of the legal safeguards and options-commonly known as TRIPS 'flexibilities'-that the Agreement provides. To explain this variation, this book argues that TRIPS implementation must be understood as a complex political game played out among developing country governments and a range of stakeholders-developed countries, non-governmental organisations (NGOs), intergovernmental organisations (IGOs), and industry groups. The contested nature of the TRIPS bargain spurred competing efforts to revise the terms of TRIPS and to influence global IP regulation more broadly. The intensity of the implementation game was amplified by an awareness among the various stakeholders that the IP reforms developing countries pursued would influence these ongoing international negotiations. The book attributes the variation in TRIPS implementation to the interplay between these global IP debates, international power pressures, and political dynamics within developing countries. The book includes historical analysis, compilations of evidence, and analysis supported by examples from across the developing world. The Implementation Game will be of interest both to scholars of international relations, law, and international political economy as well as to policymakers, commentators, and activists engaged in debates on the global governance of intellectual property.

This new book contains contributions on countries from Italy and Mexico to China and India. It recognises the disparity between conditions in these countries and poses interesting questions about post cluster globalisation.