The World Health Organization (WHO) and the Government of Denmark have convened a Global Dialogue on Partnerships for Sustainable Financing of Noncommunicable Disease (NCD) Prevention and Control from 9 April 2018 to 11 April 2018 in Copenhagen. The conference is co-sponsored by the World Diabetes Foundation, World Economic Forum, NCD Alliance, and IFPMA (Source: WHO Global Dialogue on Partnerships for Sustainable Financing of Noncommunicable Disease (NCD) Prevention and Control).
On Tuesday, 10 April 2018, a plenary was held on Exploring synergies between financing national NCD responses and broader health systems strengthening efforts for universal health coverage (UHC) –Launch of the report of the Lancet Taskforce on NCDs and Economics.
During the question and answer session, James Love (Knowledge Ecology International), provided the following insights.
1. Prices of insulin, drugs and other technologies for cancer and rare diseases, as well as some new promising heart disease treatments, are astonishingly high, and access is very unequal.
2. Outside this room, people don’t think the prices of cancer drugs are sustainable.
3. The UN Secretary General’s High Level Panel on Access to Medicines want governments to explore the delinkage of R&D incentives from product prices.
4. Did the Lancet Taskforce on NCDs and economics look at drug pricing issues, because I could not find anything in the report about drug prices.
5. More importantly, did the Lancet Taskforce look at the proposals for new business models for financing innovation that delink R&D incentives from product prices. Because if you don’t delink incentives from prices, access will never be equal.
Dr. Hans Kluge from the World Health Organization (WHO) responded to KEI noting that the WHO Director-General was exploring a new social pact with the pharmaceutical industry which would involve “sitting down with industry to negotiate a fair price”.