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If the
Philippine Senate had its way, the cost of
medicines would have drastically gone
down almost a year ago. Senate Bill 2263,
authored by Senator Mar Roxas, aims to amend
specific provisions of the Intellectual
Property Code (IPC) to make medicines more
affordable to Filipinos. This bill was
unanimously passed by the Senate as early as
January 2007. But a Senate bill cannot be
pushed into law without the concurrence of
the Lower House. As of presstime, the
Congress has yet to pass the final version
of its own complementary bill. In fact, many
other bills of wide import have been brought
to the doorstep of the Lower House, but they
just lie there and they die there. Is the
fault of powerful outside forces lobbying
with all their might?
Generic Code Fails to Stop Soaring Costs
The Senate bill amends the present patent laws that give
pharmaceutical companies, both foreign and
local, the exclusive rights to manufacture
the medicines they have formulated and to
sell them at prices they fancy, for the
period of a quarter century. “Infinite
duration” is the term used by some reports.
Such exclusivity and seeming infinity have
had no other result but to jack up the
prices of medicines.
The earlier Generic Code, which obligated physicians to
write down the generic name of the medicine
they were prescribing, helped the poor
somewhat. The Generic Code gave patients the
option to buy another brand of the same
drug. It was the practice of some
pharmaceutical companies to gift physicians
lavishly so they would prescribe their brand
medicines. The practice slackened with the
passage of the Generic Code, which, however,
does not totally address the issue of
soaring prices of medicines.
Present Law Protects Pharmaceuticals, Not
Patients
The Senate Bill seeks to address the two major obstacles to
people’s access to affordable quality
medicine, to wit, the structure of the
pharmaceutical industry and the
protectionist provision of the existing law.
How So?
To begin with, unlike in other countries, the pharmaceutical
industry in the Philippines is marked by
extreme concentration or market power, which
means it is controlled by a handful of
players. There is an uncontested market.
Whatever these players charge, the market
will bear, because of the relative absence
of competition and alternatives. As some
observers noted: if water were medicine, its
flow comes only from a few faucets to
service millions upon millions of people.
Then, there is also the protectionist
provisions of the existing law. Some
quarters claim certain provisions of the
Intellectual Property Code (IPC) have been
misused over time, such as the
quarter-century time period. Prosperous
foreign pharmaceutical
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