The Problem with Tying Health Care to Trade

The word &quot;patent&quot; always sounds better than &quot;guaranteed monopoly&quot;, yet there is no fundamental difference. With respect to drug patents, I think the French system has a good system:<p>- Option 1: you sell the drug at whatever market price you want but no patent will be granted and anyone is free to copy the drug.<p>- Option 2: you receive a patent protection for you drug but you must defend the price at which you want to sell in a bargaining round with the government. In essence, it&#x27;s a compromise where you as a drug manufacturer can recoup your costs, and where the people don&#x27;t overly get taken advantage of in life-or-death situations.<p>Disclaimer: my Dad worked in a major French pharma company.

Big fear in NZ, however unfounded, is that TPPA will somehow try and reduce us to the health care standard in the US :(

The fundamental truth about health care is that no amount of taxation or insurance can live up to the demand. Even if you taxed every citizen a 100% there still wouldn&#x27;t be enough to pay for healthcare.<p>And so every society find themselves in one of the most complex paradoxes of modern times.<p>If you tax your way to healthcare and provide everyone with free healthcare like in ex. Denmark, then access to treatment is equal but it&#x27;s always a cost center and your will always mostly lag behind access to the latest treatments.<p>The only way to be able to pay for new equipment or new medicine is either through higher taxes or by budget cuts somewhere else.<p>If you go the insurance way of the US and try to let market forces rule then you end up with highly inflated prices and a younger generation that don&#x27;t insure themselves and therefore don&#x27;t pay for the healthcare system until they need it which drives up the prices of the insurance (hence Affordable Care Act).<p>Here the access isn&#x27;t equal but you have some of the best specialists in the world and always the latest treatments.<p>Then there are countries in the middle trying to find a balance like Switzerland, Germany, the UK and France but even here I fear that no one have found a perfect system either.<p>So no matter how you try and pay for it whether trough trade agreements or NGO etcs that problem still applies. Someone always have to pick up the bill and the bill is potentially infinitely big.<p>Edit: For clarification

Tying healthcare to trade would be wonderful for the US, provided the trade were free trade, because it would mean we could finally legally import dirt cheap drugs and medical supplies from abroad and allow cheaper foreign doctors and nurses to practice medicine in the US.<p>Instead, it apparently means stuff like this:<p>&gt;He detailed the many ways in which U.S. law prohibits competition for pharmaceuticals that Peruvian law doesn’t, including granting new patents to old drugs for relatively small changes

&gt; In recent decades, the majority of new drugs brought to market have been of little real therapeutic benefit.<p>If drug companies are trying to charge ridiculous high prices for drugs with &quot;little therapeutic benefit&quot;, wouldn&#x27;t it be easier just to <i>not buy those drugs</i> than to re-work the patent system?