Tahir Amin: Rising Drug Prices

Tahir Amin, DipLP, co-founder and director of intellectual property of Initiative for Medicines, Access, and Knowledge, discusses whether companies' promises to stop raising drug prices will benefit patients.

Transcript:

Well, I was just reading this morning that the now soon-departing CEO of Pfizer actually said that business will return to normal next year, so despite some of the price stalling that has gone on, I don’t think that’s going to change. I think they’re just waiting to have the public elections happens, see what happens, waiting for the issues to shift somewhere else and then they’ll start all over again.

If we look at the trends over the last 6 to 8 years, we’ve seen price hikes on average of 68%. There’s no reason to think that the pharmaceutical companies are going to stop hiking the prices, and this is why we believe it is imperative we start to be more strict with how we give pharmaceutical companies the power through the patent system and other exclusivities such that they’re able to do this over and over again, as our reports have shown, the longer they have these exclusivities for, they annually hike these prices up. I don’t see that being a solution.