E-DRUG: New critical analysis article on tiered pricing and access to medicines
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Authors from Medecins Sans Frontieres and Harvard School of Public Health
have published a critical analysis of the role of tiered pricing to improve
access to medicines in developing countries. The study was presented today
at the Third International Conference for Improving Use of Medicines in
Turkey.
Tiered-pricing is the concept of selling drugs and vaccines in developing
countries at prices systematically lower than in industrialised countries
and is increasingly used for newer medicines.
The analysis includes case studies on prices for medicines for HIV,
malaria, drug-resistant tuberculosis and visceral leishmaniasis, and for
pneumococcal vaccines.
The authors found that tiered prices are generally higher than those
achieved by competition. In many developing countries, resources are often
stretched so tight that affordability can only be approached by selling
medicines at or near the cost of production.
Indentified challenges with tiered pricing include that the decision-making
power lies entirely in the hands of manufacturers and that arbitrary
divisions between countries can lead to very high prices for middle-income
markets. However, in special cases, tiered pricing can be the only
practical option to ensure access in the short term; for example, when
market volumes are small and/or it is not possible to immediately have
competitors.
Competition should generally be the default option for achieving
affordability, as it has proven to be superior to tiered pricing for
reliably achieving the lowest sustainable prices. Policies that “de-link” the financing of R&D from the price of medicines are needed, since they can reward innovation while exploiting robust competition in production to generate the lowest sustainable prices.
The article is available open access at
www.globalizationandhealth.com/content/7/1/39
Suerie Moon, Elodie Jambert, Michelle Childs and Tido von Schoen Angerer:
‘A win-win solution?: A critical analysis of tiered pricing to improve
access to medicines in developing countries.’ Globalization and Health
2011, 7:39
Joanna Keenan
Press Officer
Campaign for Access to Essential Medicines
Medecins Sans Frontieres
joanna.keenan[at]geneva.msf.org
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