AS I SEE IT, by Neal Cruz
Inquirer – June 13, 2007

MANILA, Philippines -- We celebrated another Independence Day yesterday, but sadly we are still not independent of foreign domination in various aspects of our life. And nowhere is it more felt than in the prices of medicine. We have the most expensive medicines in Asia, next only to Japan, a very rich and developed nation. Our prices are higher than those in more developed countries like China, Singapore, Hong Kong, Malaysia, etc.

To give you an idea of how our drug prices compare with those of other Asean countries, look at these figures: One out of every five adult Filipinos, or roughly 7.76 million Filipinos, suffer from high blood pressure. Hypertension, or high blood pressure, is the fifth leading cause of death in the Philippines. Every year, it claims an average of 300,000 lives.

A medicine for hypertension, Norvasc, is sold here by a foreign company for a whopping P41.41 per 5-mg tablet. In India and Pakistan, the same drug, manufactured by the same company, is sold for the equivalent of roughly P5.77 per 5-mg tablet. Another medicine for hypertension, Plendil, is sold here for P21.82 per tablet; it costs only P2.69 in India.

Asthma affects 12 percent to 15 percent of the total population. I have four very close and very talented friends in the journalism profession that died, suddenly, of asthma. A Ventolin inhaler costs P315.00 here; in India, it costs only P126.78.

Bactrim 400, priced at P17.75 per tablet here, can be bought for only P1 in Pakistan and P0.69 in India. Ponstan, a common painkiller, costs P24.92 per pill here but costs only P3.22 in India.

Why are the prices of medicine in the Philippines so high? Because of the Intellectual Property Code which gives a pharmaceutical company that discovered or developed a medicine a 25-year patent on that medicine. This patent gives it a monopoly to produce and sell that medicine. Without any competition, it can sell its medicine at any price it wants. The policy of multinational pharmaceutical companies here is to price their medicines for “as much as the market can bear.” That is why prices of their drugs here are sky-high. Filipinos are forced to buy them because they have no choice. There are no competing products.

Why are drug prices in other Asian nations much lower? Because they have amended their Intellectual Property Code or passed laws to allow their own pharmaceutical companies to manufacture the same drugs under certain conditions. On the other hand, the IPC in force here does not even allow the importation of cheaper medicines that are the same as those sold here by multinational companies—even if these medicines are produced by their satellite companies. Any importer, government or private, faces the threat of a court suit from these multinational companies that do not want imported drugs to compete with their products.

The Philippines is in the stranglehold of a cartel, or oligopoly, of foreign firms—more so than the oil cartel and the cement cartel. We should think about this not only on Independence Day but every day that we have not broken that stranglehold. Filipinos are dying at an alarming rate not because there are no doctors and medicines. The medicines are there but Filipinos cannot afford them.

We have local companies that can produce the equivalent of the high-priced drugs produced by the multinationals but they cannot do this because of the patent rights of the latter. From 2001 to 2005, the Intellectual Property Office issued 2,097 patents to multinational pharmaceutical firms but only one to a Filipino applicant. During the same period, multinationals filed 170 patent applications as against only 22 applications by local companies. Obviously, our laws heavily protect patents of foreign firms.

Our government knows this. It tried to solve the problem by setting up the Philippine International Trading Corp. (PITC), which imports inexpensive medicines and sells them here. But the budget of the PITC to procure medicines is minuscule compared to the P85-billion pharmaceutical market in the Philippines, at least 60 percent of which is controlled by multinational companies. Moreover, the outlets of the PITC are few and too small to make even a dent in the monopoly of the giant drugstore chain Mercury.

The answer is to make it easy for local drug firms to manufacture the generic versions of the expensive, imported medicines as they do in India and Pakistan and in other Asean countries.

Members of Congress also know the problem, and senators and congressmen have filed bills that would lower the prices of medicine. The Senate passed Senate bill 2263; the House has House Bill 6035. Considering the urgent need for a law that would make medicine affordable to all Filipinos (half of the Philippines’ 85 million population have no access to essential medicines), one would think that our “honorable” legislators would lose no time in passing such a bill.

But while the Senate passed its version, the House did not. The House was supposed to pass its version during the last three days of session of the 13th Congress, after which a bicameral conference committee would have reconciled the two versions and passed a bill that would become the law once the President signed it. But the House could not get a quorum to pass its bill and Congress adjourned without passing this important legislation.

The bill will now have to go back to step one in the long, convoluted legislative mill and it could take many months or even years before it is passed. By that time, many more Filipinos will be dead because they could not afford to buy medicines.