OPINION: 'Win-Win Deals' Between Drug Companies, Purchasers Solution To Intellectual Property Debates

In this Foreign Policy opinion piece, Roger Bate, a resident scholar at the American Enterprise Institute specializing in international health policy, discusses in detail the debates over intellectual property protection for drugs in relation to access to these drugs in developing countries and highlights a number of recent cases involving intellectual property legislation in the developing world. “Stricter TRIPS implementation is in the broad public interest because it increases incentives to innovate,” but “TRIPS is really a distraction from the job of increasing medicine access in the developing world,” he writes, concluding, “The solution lies in win-win deals between drug companies and institutional purchasers (domestic health agencies or foreign donors) that segment the market and tier prices sensibly. … [T]he real action is in making hybrid deals that recognize the political realities, and move on” (7/23).

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