http://www.a2meurope.eu/index.php?id=home
Press statement quote for Conference “Can EU citizens afford their medicnes?” on May 16th, 2013 in European Parliament, Brussels
David Hammerstein TransAtlantic Consumer Dialogue:
“Today the EU seems to be much more concerned about the health of large banks than the health of its citizens. Radical austerity measures imposed on a number of EU member states means that millions of persons are being denied life-saving medical treatment by public health systems. Because the EU´s one-sided pro big-pharma purely market oriented policies allow unaffordable high prices for many treatments, now we have a growing access to medicine problem inside Europe. A health needs oriented EU policy would include pooled procurement of key medicines, flexible IPR rules and anti-monopoly measures to promote generic competition and imports, social conditionality norms on the results of publicly financed biomedical research and stringent transparency regulations so we could evaluate the real efficacy and safety of existing medicines. We also need a “de-linkage” of R and D costs from the price of life-saving medicines. The present EU pharmaceutical model is dominated by massive marketing costs, poor innovation outcomes and artificially maintained high prices. The crisis has made this situation unsustainable.”