[Ip-health] US opposes transparency of pharmaceutical industry economics at PAHO meeting

[James Love]

http://www.huffingtonpost.com/james-love/us-opposes-transparency-o_b_220661.html
Huffington Post
US opposes transparency of pharmaceutical industry economics at PAHO
meeting
James Love, Director, Knowledge Ecology International
June 25, 2009

It is not easy to make good policies when you don't have good
information.  So it is surprising that the Administration is opposing a
measure to have more openness about pharm industry economics.

In recent years, there has been a push for greater transparency of the
pharmaceutical industry.  One aspect of this concerns greater
disclosures of the clinical trials on new drugs, including information
about the resolutions of those trials.  There are also proposals for
greater disclosure of potential conflicts of interests with academic
researchers and doctors who prescribe medicine.

Today the Pan American Health Organization is considering a proposal
have more transparency of the economics of the industry.  Specially, the
original proposal was:

"(j) to develop, with input from Member States, a possible standard for
disclosure of economic data for drug registered for sale, including
disclosures of the costs of R&D, the prices of products, and the annual
revenues from the sale of products."

Unfortunately, the US Department of Health and Human Services (DHHS) is
trying to kill this language, raising a number of bogus objections,
including that mandated disclosure would violate antitrust laws.

The reality is that there are few secrets within the industry about
prices, revenues or R&D costs, if you can pay for pricey private sector
reports, such as those provided by IMS Health.  But the public, academic
researchers not on the industry payroll, legislators and government
policy makers have access to very little data.

The US SEC requires disclosures of the costs of clinical trials, when
the information has a material impact on the value of a stock, and
companies routinely put out press statements making all sorts of
unsupported claims about the costs of particular trials, and this has
never been the basis for an antitrust claim.

We are not sure who in the DHHS leadership has been opposing the
proposal to merely begin work on transparency standards, but someone in
the White House or the Secretary's office should set in and fix
things.


--
James Love, Director, Knowledge Ecology International
http://www.keionline.org | mailto:james.love at keionline.org
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