As world leaders prepare to gather for the 66th World Health Assembly on May 20, social movements are questioning the market-friendly version of universal health coverage (UHC) it is promoting.
One organization, Jan Swasthya Abhiyan (JSA), is denouncing India’s emulation of this UHC strategy, as contained in the country’s 12th Five Year Plan, which uncritically endorses the private medical sector and focuses on health insurance schemes. In a recent paper – JSA proposes an alternative UHC model.
Public financing for whom?
In the past five years there has been an impressive roll out of government-funded insurance schemes in India that are supposed to improve the country’s public health system. In theory, treatment covered under these schemes can be provided by any accredited facility. But in practice the majority of providers are found in the largely unregulated private sector which already accounts for 80% of outpatient and 60% of in-patient care according to the National Sample Survey Organisation (NSSO), making India one of the most privatized systems in the world. India’s healthcare system is increasingly dominated by big hospitals chains (e.g. Apollo Hospitals) with an infamous track record of expensive services and unethical practices. As it is, health insurance schemes mostly channel public monies for private profit. For example, from 2007 to 2013 the state of Andhra Pradesh allocated a total Rs.47.23 billion to facilities accredited under the Arogyasri scheme, of which Rs.36.52 billion went to private facilities.
Getting it right
Health is a right, and priorities should be based on citizens’ needs. What the majority of Indians lack is comprehensive primary care, but current health insurance “packages” only insure beneficiaries for ailments that require hospitalization. They cover a very small portion of the burden of disease, excluding out-patient treatments for tuberculosis, diabetes, hypertension, heart conditions, and cancer among others. Evidence from the first such scheme in India – Arogyasri – suggests that it consumed 25% of the state’s health budget but addressed only 2% of the burden of disease.
Who inverted the pyramid?
This situation ends up distorting the very structure of the health system by starving primary care facilities to the benefit of more profitable secondary and tertiary care. In 2009-2010, direct national government expenditure on tertiary care was slightly over 20% of total health expenditure, but if one adds spending on the insurance schemes the total would be closer to 37%. In Andhra Pradesh, following the implementation of Arogyasri, the proportion of funds allocated for primary care fell by 14%.
A good health system is like a pyramid: the largest numbers should be treated at the primary level where people live and work. We need to flip the inverted pyramid that has been created and offer a new roadmap predicated on public funding and provisioning of a public system that reprioritizes primary health care, and is comprehensive, integrated and accessible to all.
Bad medicine
The health insurance schemes in place fail to address another key issue: access to medicines. Paradoxically, India is the largest producer of drugs in the developing world and at the same time the country where the WHO estimates the greatest number can’t afford the medicines they need. Since the Patent Act was amended in 2005, domestic pharmaceutical companies can’t produce cheaper versions of new drugs, which are now sold by multinationals at prices well beyond the reach of most patients. Poor regulations also means more than 50% of the average family spending on medicines is on irrational or unnecessary drugs and diagnostic tests according to the NSSO. Clearly, the pharmaceutical sector must be reigned in, and all essential drugs should be made available, free of cost, at all public facilities.
Addressing public health gaps
The task of achieving health for all in India will not be easy. Current public health services are marked by poor access, low quality and limited choice. Besides rampant corruption, poor management results in mismatches between demand and supply of services: facilities aren’t distributed optimally; equipment and funds fall short of requirements and don’t flow efficiently. Labour shortages can be partly explained by disinvestment in medical education and flawed deployment mechanisms. Although programs such as the National Rural Health Mission have made some inroads to improve services, much remains to be done. The problem is largely one of unresponsiveness to citizens coupled with unreliable technical estimates of costs and disease burden, leading to ill-informed prioritization.
It is necessary to recast the UHC debate and propose alternatives to strengthen the public health systemto address these problems and to build integrated, comprehensive services with strong mechanisms of accountability. Key to these changes are the following:
Over the short term, we also need to explore alternate ways of harnessing private resources for public health goals. Given the sheer size of the private sector, it is not possible to entirely ignore it while planning for equitable access to public services. It’s not a monolithic entity either; some segments such as charitable, faith-based and other not-for-profit healthcare facilities that work in less developed parts of the country can fill certain critical gaps in the public system. Under clear terms and conditions, other private providers such as general practitioners or small and medium-sized hospitals could be in-sourced to complement available public health services. Importantly, there should be no transfer of assets and resources into private hands and kickback statutes should be put in place to ensure there are no referrals with conflict of interests.
All the possible mechanisms for harnessing the private sector should be seen as supplementary (and often interim) measures, and not as a substitute for very significant scaling up and strengthening of the public system both in terms of quality and accessibility.
There is a need to reclaim public systems, to strengthen and expand them. Moving toward health for all requires major transformations in health care, but also in a wide range of social determinants of health – food security and nutrition, water supply, sanitation, working conditions, housing, environment, education and more. We need to build broad-based alliances for social change to redefine the relationship between people and their public systems.
Amit Sengupta is a Research Associate with the Municipal Services Project and Associate Global Co-ordinator with the People’s Health Movement, a global network of 18 national chapters that includes India’s Jan Swasthya Abhiyanfor which he acts as National Co-convenor.
Madeleine Bélanger Dumontier is Communications Manager for the Municipal Services Project, a global research initiative that explores alternatives to the privatization and commercialization of service provision in the electricity, health, water and sanitation sectors.
Photo: Rajeev Chaudhury
On 1st April patients in India celebrated a victory in the battle for affordable medicines. The Indian Supreme Court rejected a patent on B crystalline form of Imatinib Mesylate (Glivec®/Gleevec®), a cancer treatment developed by the pharmaceutical company Novartis. This decision enables patients suffering chronic myeloid leukaemia to access generic versions of Glivec at $175 per month – nearly fifteen times less than the $2,600 charged by Novartis. As the court handed down their verdict, it became clear that India chose to prioritise protecting the health of citizens above the commercial interest of pharmaceutical companies.
Novartis has been trying to challenge the Indian Intellectual Property law since 2006 when its patent application for Glivec was first rejected. Novartis claimed that Indian Patent Law did not conform to the Agreement on Trade Related Aspects of Intellectual Property Rights (TRIPS). It is worth noting that no other company or country has ever sought to make this claim against India to the World Trade Organisation – the body responsible for settling such disputes. After much debate, the court turned down the Novartis case.
The case rests on the way the India intellectual property law makes use of many of the flexibilities of the TRIPS agreement, including how the patentability criterion defines innovation. Section 3D of the Indian law, which is condemned by Novartis and other pharmaceutical companies, prevents patents on new forms, uses, doses, formulations and combinations of known medicines or substances. Instead, to be granted a patent, the revised medicine must show significantly enhanced therapeutic efficacy.
In the Novartis case, although the company provided evidence of improved physical features of the medicine, it did not demonstrate improved therapeutic efficacy. Novartis presented some late evidence of increased bio-availability of the revised medicine but even that was based on comparison with the original molecule of imatinib which is actually no longer marketed as treatment. Moreover, increased bio-availability does not automatically mean enhanced therapeutic efficacy.
The claim by pharmaceutical companies that Indian patent law will stop innovation is without foundation. On the contrary, Section 3D encourages innovation (incremental or otherwise) by preventing companies like Novartis securing patent extensions for making trivial changes to their products – a practice known as ‘Evergreening’. Allowing companies to secure patents, and therefore profits, by making trivial changes to existing products acts as a disincentive for much needed R&D investment in new products to treat and prevent diseases.
Novartis, along with other companies are also claiming the court ruling will put an end to R&D investment by companies in India. They argue that the unlikelihood of securing patents removes any incentive for R&D investment. The reality is that other scientific and economic factors have proven much more important for R&D investment including the availability of a strong science base in a country, appropriate infrastructure and an industry-friendly tax system.
In short the court resolution means that more people suffering chronic myeloid leukaemia can be treated now. Novartis says that its patent on Glivec is protected in 40 countries. That means the rest of the world can now use generic versions of Glivec without worrying about patent issues. Developing countries need to learn from India in promoting the use of high-quality generic medicines so that patients can access treatment at affordable prices.
The story highlights the urgent need to review the dysfunctional intellectual property system and find new ways of stimulating R&D to produce new medicines that have real therapeutic value. In the interim, pharmaceutical companies should stop spending millions of dollars on litigation in their effort to secure patents for evergreening their products. Instead they should invest in R&D for new products that could make a real difference to people’s lives.
Mohga Kamal-Yanni is a Senior Health and HIV Policy Adviser at Oxfam GB
Photo credit: Novartis AG / Foter.com / CC BY-NC-ND
A new documentary film opening in UK and Irish cinemas this week tells the story of what its makers call “the Crime of the Century” – how available low-cost antiretroviral medicine was blocked from reaching Africa and other parts of the global south in the years after 1996. The film signals the dangers of the increasingly-perilous outlook for access to essential medicine in developing countries.
Fresh from its much-talked-about premiere at the Sundance Film Festival in Park City, Utah, last month, Fire in the Blood opens at the Irish Film Institute (IFI) in Dublin and the Prince Charles Cinema in London later this week. The film will be released in cinemas across the UK on Monday 25th February. The film tells a harrowing story of inhumanity and heroism, with a highly compelling cast of characters. It details how it could come to pass that millions upon millions of people, primarily in Africa, were left to die horrible, painful deaths, while the drugs which could have saved them were being safely and cheaply produced and distributed just a short airplane ride away.
“I was curious to see what the reaction in the US would be”, says writer-director Dylan Mohan Gray. “So much indoctrination about the necessity of high drug prices has gone on there that the Big Pharma Research & Development (R&D) defence is very much a sacred cow… even those with profound reservations about how the industry behaves tend to grudgingly accept its validity. This is very easy for me to understand, since I was more or less that way myself when I began digging into all this.” Gray was, however, gratified to discover that the American audiences who waited in line to attend six sold-out screenings at Sundance had much the same reaction after seeing the film that he had had when he began to work on the story. “There is a very strong sense of betrayal when people find out what their governments have done in their name… and a very powerful conviction that the prevailing system of developing and commercialising medicine has to change”.
As the film points out, drug companies actually do very little basic research for drug discovery. “84% of drug discovery research is funded by government and public sources”, says Gray, citing the landmark work of Professor Donald Light, “Pharmaceutical companies fund just 12% of such research, while the lion’s share of their spending goes into marketing and administration.” These facts will come as little surprise to those familiar with the industry, but many have never really contemplated the repercussions of pricing essential medicines at levels only a tiny sliver of the world’s population can afford.
While the film tells the story of how multinational drug companies and the Western governments collaborated to keep low-cost generic AIDS drugs out of the hardest-hit countries at the height of the HIV/AIDS pandemic – at a cost of ten million or more lives – it also tells the fascinating story of the unlikely group of people which came together in order to try and break this blockade. Among this number were front-line doctors, HIV-positive activists, generic drugmakers, intellectual property specialists and individuals of global stature such as Desmond Tutu and Bill Clinton (both interviewed in the film). “That’s what really set this story apart for me”, says Gray. “It was a real-life David versus Goliath tale, full of incredibly interesting, daring, courageous mavericks who took on the world’s most powerful companies and governments to do what virtually everyone else at the time said was impossible (i.e. mass treatment of HIV/AIDS in Africa), and against all odds they won…”
While the inspirational story of how low-cost generic AIDS drugs, first and foremost from India, came to save millions upon millions of lives in Africa (and beyond) is at the heart of FIRE IN THE BLOOD, the film concludes on a distinctly alarming note. “The story this film tells was on the verge of being forgotten, something we can’t afford to let happen”, says Gray. The film details the tireless efforts of Western governments, working on behalf of industry, to impede and cut off supplies of affordable generic medicine from countries like India and Thailand to other parts of the global south, primarily by means of bi- and multilateral trade agreements which low- and middle-income countries are placed under enormous pressure to sign.
“The drug industry is stagnant, its pipeline is anemic and it has pinned all its future hopes on China and India”, notes Gray. “Almost all these companies are publicly-traded, which means their bosses have to keep turning profits quarter-by-quarter if they want to try and keep their jobs… as they see it, they simply can’t afford to take a humanitarian view on issues of access.” With the World Health Organisation having estimated that one-third of all deaths worldwide are attributable to treatable and preventable diseases, largely due to lack of access to medicine, the stakes could not be higher.
Meanwhile, for all its insistence that high prices are the only practical trade-off for an industry that spends so much money on R&D to find new and innovative medicines, Gray noted with a wry smile that the who’s who of senior pharma executives will be gathering in London for the industry’s can’t-miss event, the Pharma Summit, just a few days after FIRE IN THE BLOOD opens theatrically in the UK. “I was amused, but not surprised, to read that the theme of this year’s summit is Should pharma cut its losses and get out of R&D?”.
Araddhya Mehtta is a global heath campaigner for Oxfam GB.
A few months ago Oxfam published a critical report on the Affordable medicines facility for malaria (AMFm), calling it a ‘dangerous distraction’ from more effective ways of providing treatment. Our problem with the scheme is that it relies on unqualified shopkeepers to diagnose and distribute drugs, rather than trained health workers. This means there’s a huge danger of people being misdiagnosed, given there are many other causes of fever, not just malaria.
Oxfam spoke to people in Ghana, to see what their experiences were. Christiana’s story highlights how harmful selling someone the wrong medicines can be.
Christiana Donyinaa is 43 and makes a living selling cosmetics. A few months ago her youngest daughter, Gloria (age 12), became ill with a fever. Christiana went to a shopkeeper and described Gloria’s symptoms and was told her daughter had malaria. The shopkeeper sold her malaria drugs.
“I gave Gloria the medicine and she felt better after a few days. The following week, schools were on vacation so she decided to visit her older sister, who lives in Accra. As soon as she got to Accra she felt sick again. Her sister took her to the hospital and she was diagnosed with typhoid fever. She was admitted to hospital for several weeks.
I got very worried because school had resumed and she was still in the hospital. The doctor said Gloria had been suffering from typhoid for a very long time, but because we didn’t take her to the hospital, we didn’t realise it early enough.
When I was told that she was sick, I was very concerned and quickly jumped on a bus to Accra. When I got there her condition was serious and I stayed with her in the hospital for more than two weeks.”
Gloria’s condition became quite serious, she found it difficult to breathe and couldn’t eat anything without being sick. Because Christiana was at her daughter’s bedside, she was unable to earn any money over those few weeks. She also spent all the money she needed to run her business on medical expenses. In the end Gloria spent several months off school recovering and has now fallen behind with her studies.
“Gloria’s sickness has affected her a lot. She wants to be a Nurse in future but her illness has set her back a bit.”
Christiana believes that malaria medication should only be prescribed and distributed by trained health workers and not through shopkeepers.
“The advice I have for the government and NGOs is that the malaria drug is very good, if you have malaria. But they should not give it to the drug peddlers; they should give it only to clinics. Some of the drug peddlers have these medicines in their pockets. They sell it to you when you tell them you have a headache, they will just give you the medicines without any diagnosis. This is very dangerous the drug peddlers don’t know what illness people have.
I will advise every parent that when their child is sick they should take them to a doctor. Because if I had taken Gloria to the hospital from the onset when she was sick I don’t think both of us would have suffered as we have done.”
Oxfam is warning against any further funding for the AMFm scheme and for money to be used to invest in the training and salaries of community health workers instead, who are proven to save lives.
Sarah Dransfield is the Essential Services Press Officer at Oxfam GB
In 2001, I stood in front of a huge picture in the UN building in New York. It showed an African woman on her death bed with another woman hold her hand. It said: “You must not die alone”. I screamed: “You must not die full stop! There is treatment!”
My friends in the UK were living and working thanks to treatment provided free through the public health system, so why not this lady?
Today, interviewers ask me: “What are the major challenges for HIV in country X?” My response is that there are four challenges facing all countries dealing with HIV: funding, health systems, medicines and prejudice.
AIDS has uncovered many ills in the world: donors’ lack of long term commitment, weak health systems and flawed drug research and pricing. Not to mention deep-rooted stigma, prejudice and discrimination against marginalised including women, men who have sex with men, drug users, and sex workers.
Achieving the goal of an AIDS-free generation and the control of HIV is in sight but action is needed now.
1. Donors dragging their feet
Firstly, donors are dragging their feet from supporting the Global Fund which provides grants to countries to finance effective prevention, treatment and care programmes. Clearly donors need to re-think their reluctance. The more people we treat now and the more infections we prevent, the less costly the AIDS response will be in the near future and the more lives will be saved. The opposite is also true: ignore scaling up of prevention and treatment now and pay later not only in terms of lives lost but also in terms of money needed to contain an escalating epidemic.
2. Drug companies – part of the problem as well as the solution
Second, drug companies! They are a big part of both the problem and the solution. Thanks to Indian generic companies’ competition, the price of first line antiretrovirals dropped from £10,000 per patient per year to under $100. But now patients need more effective medicines and some need new ones which are still under patent. To avoid the patent block, civil society organisations and others supported UNITAID, the international drug purchasing facility, to establish the Medicine Patent Pool (MPP). MPP acts as a one stop shop where the big international pharmaceutical companies license their medicines to the pool and then generic medicine manufacturers can make the needed combinations – paying royalties on sales in countries that have patent on those drugs.
Yet so far, the big companies are dragging their feet or refusing to join. Only Gilead issued a license, which represents a good start but still needs to be improved. ViiV Healthcare (created by GSK and Pfizer), Boehringer Ingelheim, Bristol-Myers Squibb, Roche and Bristol Myers Squib are taking a long, long time to negotiate with MPP. I am not sure when they will conclude these negotiations with decent licenses. We cannot wait forever!
Other companies – notably Johnson & Johnson, Merck and Abbott – refused to join. Instead, they are trying hard to polish their public image by cutting separate deals with generic medicine manufacturers but the terms of the licenses are not transparent and they exclude patients in many countries. For example, the latest J&J deal on the drug “darunavir” excludes the West Bank and Gaza where the drug is sold at USD 5900 per patient per year!
When will drug companies put patients’ lives before making huge profits?
3. A critical need to invest in public health systems
The need for treatment programmes highlights once again the fact that investing in public health systems must be a priority for all governments and donors. Without qualified health workers (including managers, planners, pharmacists, etc) infrastructure, health information systems, and medical supplies, we will not be able to scale up treatment to reach all who need it. Yet some government donors still see investing in public health system as a remote goal to dream about rather than an urgent action to be performed now. A decade of increased funding for HIV response and most countries still face bottle necks in the drug supply chain – because of a lack of investment.
4. Addressing discrimination
Last but not least, all governments, community and societal leaders must address the deep-rooted discrimination in their societies. Countries cannot continue to ignore the rights of women, girls and marginalised groups under the cover of culture, religion or any other banner. In this age where young people across the world are communicating and sharing views and ideas about rights, it is not possible to continue with discriminatory laws and rules.
For a start, access to prevention, treatment and care is a right for all.
Mohga Kamal-Yanni is a Senior Health and HIV Policy Adviser at Oxfam GB.
This blog was originally posted on Oxfam Policy and Practice website on the 1st December 2012.
