Ensuring access to essential medicines: some economic considerations.

Abstract

This symposium is a welcome addition to international deliberations about how to ensure an adequate and sustainable supply of essential medicines to patients in poor countries. The complexities in this task are great and involve issues of basic human rights politics and economics. This paper describes and analyzes certain central economic questions including benefits from wider access to treatment for debilitating diseases in developing countries the nature of dynamic market failures methods for establishing effective price differentiation and additional contributions required in terms of foreign assistance for meeting critical health needs. The scope of critical health problems facing the poorest nations is immense and tragic. For example it is estimated that of the approximately 3 million people who died from HIV/AIDS in 2001 2.3 million of these were in Sub-Saharan Africa. Mortality from malaria is estimated to be over 1 million deaths each year with the vast majority occurring among young children in Africa. Tuberculosis (TB) kills perhaps 2 million people per year and one-third of the worlds population is currently infected with the TB bacillus. Mortality is only one result; these three diseases alone removed approximately 168 million disability-adjusted life years from the living standards of people worldwide with most of these losses in Africa. The economic cost from reduced productivity and labor force participation is significant. Studies suggest that South African GDP will be perhaps 17 percent lower in 2010 that it would be without HIV/AIDS reducing output by perhaps 22 billion dollars. The fiscal costs imposed on the poor countries health care budgets as these diseases progress will also be large. (excerpt)