http://thinkprogress.org/health/2015/02/24/3626091/you-received-without-payment-give-without-payment/
The Vatican took on “Big Pharma” last week, asking the international community to reform laws that allow drug companies to blindly pursue profits while keeping life-saving drugs out of the hands of poor people.
According to Vatican Radio, last Wednesday Archbishop Silvano M. Tomasi, the Permanent Observer of the Holy See to the United Nations, spoke at a UN Forum dedicated to making medicines more affordable and accessible for people in poorer nations. In his address, Tomasi argued that there are many obstacles that keep poor people from purchasing drugs, but called out one issue as particularly devastating: the abuse of intellectual property laws by pharmaceutical companies
“A major stumbling block in providing such access is found in restrictive applications and interpretations of intellectual property rights by many in the pharmaceutical industry,” Tomasi said, adding “[The current system] can lead to total disregard for those who cannot afford the price of certain medical products and allow an imbalanced free trade system, and thus constitute a virtual monopoly.”
The Archbishop also noted that most intellectual property systems only incentivize developing medications that accrue the biggest profits, which usually means companies spend the vast majority of their resources making drugs for people in wealthier nations. As such, businesses often fail to develop treatments for maladies common in poorer countries, such as tropical diseases, tuberculosis, malaria, hepatitis, and Ebola.
This ruthless pursuit of profits can even lead to epidemics. In January, health care advocates criticized drug companies Pfizer and GlaxoSmithKline for making vaccines too expensive for children in poor countries, and last November the World Health Organization (WHO) cited the pharmaceutical industry’s obsession with the bottom line as the primary reason for a delay in creating an Ebola vaccine: most Western pharmaceutical companies were slow to pursue a vaccine for the disease, WHO officials said, because the virus wasn’t prevalent outside of Central Africa.
as long as there are rich in the world that can purchase life in a bottle that is where the interest will be. there is no noble motivation like healing the world when the large percent of the world can't pay the piper. they are not about to use the profits from those rich consumers of health and cures on the top shelf where those who don't have piles of money to stand on can't reach them. regardless to those agencies that help the humanitarian effort if those big pharma's don't release the advanced drugs that make the difference in so many lives and some politicians have no incentive to pass laws that can help the poor and elderly, as proved by recent efforts to kill off Nat'l institutes of health and the CDC.
sequestration definitely is the vehicle that kills programs and republicans have tried hard to blame them on the WH leaving them with no responsibility, but let's dig a little deeper.
But even if we assume that the idea did originate in the White House, we need to remember one more thing: The debt ceiling agreement that contained the sequestration cuts got significantly more Republican support than Democratic support.
In fact, 174 of 240 House Republicans voted for it, while just half of House Democrats joined them (95 out of 190 votes). In the Senate, Democrats carried the vote, providing 45 of the 74 "yes" votes, but Senate Republicans also supported it by a 28-19 margin.
So in total, more than 70 percent of congressional Republicans voted for the deal that included the sequester, while 58 percent of Democrats voted for it.
while responsibility is not exclusive to republicans they have more rocks in their pile.
