Patents Against People: How Drug Companies Price Patients out of Survival

In: Dissent: a quarterly of politics and culture, Volume 60, Issue 4, p. 71-77

Abstract

As our television screens toggle between pundits squabbling over Obamacare's insurance rules and ads for erectile dysfunction remedies, another health care battle rages in village clinics and corporate boardrooms. Behind the seductive commercials for breakthrough treatments, multinational brands and technocrats are concocting supranational policies to hold poor patients hostage to pharmaceutical markets across the Global South through elaborate intellectual property schemes in international trade. And while the industry sutures the future of medicine to the business of exploiting disease, poor countries serve as an incubator for neoliberal policies that boost the industry's power in Washington, capitalizing on regional inequality to degrade public health on a global scale.