is this agreement news for you guys over there?
there are many issues involved, but the one that a lot of people here are VERY concerned with is the possible changes to Australia's Medical Benefit's Schemes.
if you are unfamilure, here's a crash course.
Australia has one of, if not THE world's best medical benefit's scheme. other country's governments use it as a model for their own local schemes.
one of the many handy things about the scheme is that the government (via a board of truely respected doctors) is able to control the prices that drug companys are able to charge for their drugs, by simply setting the figure of how much the government will subsidize the cost of that drug to the public (so we, the public, pay very little for it). every drug must be proven to the government's medicare board for it's ACTUAL worth in relation to the other similar drugs, basically proving if it is worthy of it's higher price over it's competition. and the government sets the subsidy accordingly.
ie: if a new drug's worth is found to be "unimpressive" compared to the older drugs, then it is only subsidized by a similarly "unimpressive" ammount.
If new drug B is found to be prettymuch the same effectiveness as old Drug A, but the drug company wants to charge 4X the price for it, then that drug won't sell very well at all. Medicare will pay the SAME subsidy on both drugs, and this will mean that at the chemist new Drug A will still be 4x more expensive than old Drug B.
since at the chemist the public will always choose the cheaper non-name-brand drugs (the chemist and doctor will generally advise the patient to do this anyway). new Drug B will never leave the shelf, and frankly nor should it.
Advertisements for Prescription Medicines are illegal in australia.
i am of the understanding that in the USA drugs are extremely expensive, costing some people upto thousands of dollars a month.
thanks to this system keeping the drug companys in line, here in australia you can pick drugs up from the chemist for pocket change. (i understand that in usa ppl will opt to cross the border and go buy their drugs in canada, good idea).
The powerful USA Drug Companys HATE these australian laws that basically stop them from fleecing the public here. and try to do all they can to bypass/kill them, but they have always been unsuccessful in their efforts (horray).
This up comming USA-Australia free trade agreement has been found to have some fine print that could very well ★■◆● up australia's protection against the US drug companys.
It's to do with Intellectual Property Laws.
you see, there is this crazy clause in the agreement that actually says that australia is to "attempt to bring it's I.P. laws more into line with USA's I.P. laws".
now, australian I.P. laws are pretty bad, but they are NO-WHERE NEAR as fucked up as yours over there in USA.
you should see our government here trying to assure the australian public that "the agreement will have no effect on our Medical Benefits Schemes" but all we (or an investigative journalist) have to do is switch over to USA tellevision and we can hear your big drug company CEOs and your government (is there a difference?) selling the America-Australia Free Trade agreement to the house of representatives by saying as plain as day that "it will give them a foot in the door to better break into the Australian Market".
it's hilarious.
i fergot the exacts of where I.P. law quite comes into this.
i think it's got something to do with the drug companys complaining that they spend all their money on inventing a drug, only to have it's I.P. not recognized/ignored in another country, so they can't have a monopoly on the drug (waaa waaa).
now, watching a documentary about this, i kinda felt for the company for a few seconds while i heard the drug company CEO explain this connundrum. basically it sounded like he was saying that drug companys have no incentive to spend their billions of dollars researching new amazing drugs if they can't make that money back up again with sales profits.
but that empathy soon disappeared when the documentary went on to show that the drug company CEO was basically lieing like a carsalesman. Coz it went on to show the drug companys' accounting information (i'm not sure if these were available under the freedom of info act or what).
it showed that the drug companys spend next to NOTHING on research (★■◆●ing lier!) they get all of their drugs by buying the drug rights from university research departments. because almost all drug research is done in UNIVERSITYS, WITH THEIR OWN MONEY. NOT by drug companys.
to add further irony to his lies. the dollar figure of the drug companys' ADVERTISING budget is the figure which you notice they spend all of their money on (the money has to be spent somewhere doesn't it, if it's not being spent doing research).
the billions are not spent on research, they are spent on advertising.
no wonder the USA drug companys are so outof their league in australia (recall: prescription medicine advertising is illegal here).
but, if this Free Trade Agreement goes through in it's current form. our medicare system could be screwed, much to the delight of big USA drug business.
oh btw, hi guys how ya doin
