The dentist who shot the lion is no longer the most hated man in America. That honor now goes to the hedge fund manager who raised the price of a cancer drug from $13 to $750. But that will be small change as a result of some features of the Trans-Pacific Partnership recently agreed to in Atlanta.
According to Nobel Prize-winning economist Joseph Stiglitz, the “TPP would manage trade in pharmaceuticals through a variety of seemingly arcane rule changes on issues such as ‘patent linkage,’ ‘data exclusivity,’ and ‘biologics.’ The upshot is that pharmaceutical companies would effectively be allowed to extend — sometimes almost indefinitely — their monopolies on patented medicines, keep cheaper generics off the market, and block ‘biosimilar’ competitors from introducing new medicines for years. That is how the TPP will manage trade for the pharmaceutical industry if the U.S. gets its way.”
Far from a free trade agreement, the TPP is a hodgepodge of gifts to large international corporations –OK if you are a Pfizer or a Merck, but for the rest of us, not so much.
