T20 TF6 Cross countries equitable access to innovative medicines

This session is curated by T20 Task Force 6 Lead Co-Chair Hasbullah Thabrany, Professor of Health Policy and Insurance, Universitas Indonesia.

The advance of medical and pharmaceutical technologies has delivered many of new innovative medicines that are much safer and more effective. However, as the costs of research and development of new innovative medicines are high, the prices of those medicines are expensive or very expensive in some developing countries or small countries due to economic scales. While the industries that developed the drugs have price protection by having 20 years patent right, many patients such as cancer or other chronic, hereditary, or congenital diseases in developing countries may suffer from lack of access of those innovative medicines.

Price discriminations in low-income countries are not chosen by most multinational corporations due to the risk of intercountry smuggling. On the other hand, officials or decision makers in the governments or public financing agencies in developing countries often are trapped to mind-sets of providing low costs medical interventions or medicines. These inequitable conditions will go for many years to come and the SDG indicators of 3.8.2 may continue to demonstrate high proportion of catastrophic out of pocket expenditures on low- and middle-income countries. Cross countries’ experience dealing with such inequity need to be addressed.

Indonesia is looking for innovative financial and or other arrangements to solve inequitable access to innovative medicines for millions of 275 million people. Although Indonesia has developed the National Health Insurance Scheme, covering comprehensive benefits, coverage of innovative medicines remains inadequate to many of cancer and mental health patients in particular. Low health spending at about 3% of Gross Domestic Product in the last ten years become the biggest hurdle for cancer and mental health patients in Indonesia.