Recently, I've written about the ways in which TPP destroys our economic base, jobs, and, when it comes to health care, actual lives (here and here are two recent contributions). So, we should appreciate Nobel Prize-winning Joseph Stiglitz's voice on the issue of how TPP will threaten the health of millions of people.
His piece in the NYT entitled "Don't Trade Away Our Health" addresses how negotiators for the TPP are putting everyone's health at risk:
The first is to restrict competition from generics. It’s axiomatic that more competition means lower prices. When companies have to fight for customers, they end up cutting their prices. When a patent expires, any company can enter the market with a generic version of a drug. The differences in prices between brand-name and generic drugs are mind- and budget-blowing. Just the availability of generics drives prices down: In generics-friendly India, for example, Gilead Sciences, which makes an effective hepatitis-C drug, recently announced that it would sell the drug for a little more than 1 percent of the $84,000 it charges here.
That’s why, since the United States opened up its domestic market to generics in 1984, they have grown from 19 percent of prescriptions to 86 percent, by some accounts saving the United States government, consumers and employers more than $100 billion a year. Drug companies stand to gain handsomely if the T.P.P. limits the sale of generics.
The second strategy is to undermine government regulation of drug prices. More competition is not the only way to keep down the prices of essential goods and services. Governments can also directly restrain prices through law, or effectively restrain them by denying reimbursement to patients for “overpriced” drugs — thus encouraging companies to bring down their prices to approved levels. These regulatory approaches are especially important in markets where competition is limited, as it is in the drug market. If the United States Trade Representative gets its way, the T.P.P. will limit the ability of partner countries to restrict prices. And the pharmaceutical companies surely hope the “standard” they help set in this agreement will become global — for example, by becoming the starting point for United States negotiations with the European Union over the same issues.
To add to this, I repeat from what I wrote the other day about the
White House''s 10 Big Lies To Congress About The TPP:
This one is really pathetic since it literally means death and sickness for a lot of people (I’d say “shame on Froman” but I don’t think shame registers). We already know, via leaks, that the TPP would give greater monopoly protection for drug companies–greater monopoly protection equals higher prices.
Even more so, the TPP’s 12-year monopoly protection is in direct contradiction to what the president claims to be seeking. GTW:
President Obama’s budget proposes to reduce a special monopoly protection for pharmaceutical firms with regard to biologic medicines – drugs used to combat cancer and other diseases that cost approximately 22 times more than conventional medicines. To lower the exorbitant prices and the resulting burden on programs like Medicare and Medicaid, the Obama administration’s 2015 budget would reduce the period of Big Pharma’s monopoly protection for biologics from 12 to seven years. The administration estimates this would save taxpayers more than $4.2 billion over the next decade just for federal programs. However, Froman suggested yesterday that USTR continues to push for the 12 years of corporate protection in the TPP, which would lock into place pharmaceutical firms’ lengthy monopolies here at home while effectively scrapping the administration’s own proposal to save billions in unnecessary healthcare costs.
Kill this thing before it kills us.
8:37 AM PT: IMPORTANT: This is a repeated error, mostly of language and a bit laziness...THE TPP, AND ALL THE NAFTA-TYPE DEALS *ARE NOT TREATIES*, WHICH WOULD REQUIRE 2/3 OF THE SENATE--AND ONLY THE SENATE--TO APPROVE. This is called and is legally an AGREEMENT partly to make it intentionally easier to pass--with just a simple majority of both Houses required (though I do note that passing trade deals in the Senate has always been easier--NAFTA passed 61-38--so it's entirely possible that the free trade believers could get a 2/3 vote...tho probably not on TPP).