Conor Purcell interviewed him via video call between his home in Co Donegal and the interviewee’s in the UK.Well, the book really has its origins in something I uncovered during my day job where I was investigating a drug price scam here in the UK.
It turned out this abuse of the pricing model was a symptom of a whole bunch of wider changes that had swept across the pharmaceutical industry, in many ways unnoticed, over the past number of decades. These changes have in fact altered the way in which drugs are developed, and explain why there are now so many access issues for medicines, even in wealthy nations.I’ll speak mostly about the NHS here, but the systems are similar worldwide, and have implications for Ireland too.
That meant that the companies could simply increase the price as much as they wanted, essentially overnight, and know that the patients, or their health providers, would have no other option but to pay.Yes, when the system works as it should, it works very well, and you get generics cheaper than any sort of state-owned manufacturer might be capable of doing so.
In that way the medicine then becomes a gift in perpetuity to society available at a relatively low cost. That’s the sort of framework that incentivises researching new drugs, which is very expensive, difficult and risky, while also ensuring that those drugs can be accessed by those who need them. That’s a balanced approach and is how it should work.
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