While the NHS crumbles, big pharma is demanding billions more!
The current state of our NHS is nothing short of a national crisis. A record-breaking 7.2 million are now on the waiting list for treatment. Hundreds of patients are dying each week before they can access the urgent care they need. Underpaid and burnt out staff are leaving in their thousands.
And yet even as the NHS is on its knees, big pharma companies are demanding that our health system coughs up an extra £2.5 billion every year to go into their pockets - a fee which, in the current moment, could push our public health service closer to collapse.
The Association for the British Pharmaceutical Industry (ABPI) which represents the pharmaceutical industry in the UK is pushing hard to overturn an agreement known as the Voluntary Scheme for Branded Medicines Pricing and Access - or VPAS. Deliberately technical in name, VPAS is a crucial agreement designed to keep the greed of the pharmaceutical industry in check.
In 1978 the UK government and the pharmaceutical industry first negotiated a cap on branded medicines - the Pharmaceutical Price Regulation Scheme (PPRS). Yet after four decades, big pharma have decided to rip up the rulebook.
The current VPAS agreement runs for five years - from January 2019 to the end of 2023. It agrees that NHS expenditure on branded medicines stays within an agreed limit, which rises 2% per annum from 2018-23. In order to achieve this, pharmaceutical companies pay rebates on the sales back to the NHS on all expenditure above the capped limit. VPAS serves as a crucial check to the extortionate pricing of many branded medicines.
The ABPI is now proposing to replace the central NHS pricing system with a much lower tax regime, one that the government has already admitted would cost the NHS an extra £2.5 billion a year.
Forcing an NHS already at breaking point to spend even more money on drugs would be disastrous, especially at a time when our NHS has been starved of proper investment for over a decade, and declining real pay for doctors and nurses has left many with no choice but to call for unprecedented strike action.
Pharmaceutical companies are already some of the most profitable in the world. According to research by the British Medical Journal, even if companies in the pharmaceutical industry lost a fifth of their profits, they would still outperform 75% of other sectors.
VPAS was designed to ensure that the NHS medicines bill does not spiral out of control, and to place restraint on the excess profits that the industry reaps from the NHS. This rebate must stay in place or big pharma could bring down the NHS as we know it. But more than just keeping the rebate in place, it is time for the UK government to take a hard look at the current patent based model of innovation that costs our NHS so much - despite most medicines beginning life in public universities.
A group of academics have started talking out about how current Intellectual property systems are failing to deliver access to lifesaving medicines to those who need them. Claire Booth - a professor at the UCL and Consultant Paediatric Immunologist at Great Ormond Street Hospital - recently spoke out about her concerns, saying: “It really feels like we need to have a rethink…in order to achieve sustainable and affordable access to life-changing gene therapies.” (Stat News)
It’s time for politicians to listen to NHS patients, staff and public health experts. These VPAS negotiations are a chance for the UK government to ask bigger questions of the pharmaceutical industry, and think long and hard about how we ensure that essential medicines - which begin life in public institutions - are accessible to all.