Health Impact Fund
At the UW Global Justice in the 21st Century conference, Thomas Pogge gave the keynote about the Health Impact Fund, a plan for driving global health care innovation. This from their website summary.
Financed by governments, the Health Impact Fund (HIF) would offer patentees the option to forgo monopoly pricing in exchange for a reward based on the global health impact of their new medicine. By registering a patented medicine with the HIF, a firm would agree to sell it globally at cost. In exchange, the firm would receive, for a fixed time, payments based on the product’s assessed global health impact. The arrangement would be optional and it wouldn’t diminish patent rights.
The HIF would distribute large sums of money – we propose a minimum level of $6 billion to be distributed annually. This money would be divided up in proportion to the assessed health impact of each product each year. Thus firms would compete to earn a share of the money by developing and distributing new medicines to obtain the largest possible global health impact. Health impact assessment would be conducted annually by the HIF for each registered medicine.
The HIF has the potential to be an institution that benefits everyone: patients, rich and poor alike, along with their caregivers; pharmaceutical companies and their shareholders; and taxpayers. ...
Any new medicines and new uses of existing medicines registered for health impact rewards would be available everywhere at marginal cost from the start. Many patients – especially in poor countries, but increasingly in wealthy ones too – are unable to afford the best treatment because it is too expensive. Even if fully insured, patients often lack access to medicines because their insurer deems them too expensive to reimburse. The HIF solves this problem for registered drugs simply and directly by reducing prices to marginal cost.
A broader alternative by Allen Buchanan and Robert Keohane was presented at the conference by Buchanan. It addresses intellectual property issues more directly with a proposal for a Global Institute for Justice in Innovation, described in their paper, "Justice in the Diffusion of Innovation" (pdf).
