Orphan drug policies: implications for the United States, Canada, and developing countries.
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Canada↗
Biomedical subjects
Patricia Illingworth
Publications and source records attributed to Patricia Illingworth.
The dilemma of intellectual property rights for pharmaceuticals: the tension between ensuring access of the poor to medicines and committing to international agreements.
In this paper, we provide an overview of how the outcomes of the Uruguay Round affected the application of pharmaceutical intellectual property rights globally. Second, we explain how specific pharmaceutical policy tools can help developing states mitigate the worst effects of the TRIPS Agreement. Third, we put forward solutions that could be implemented by the World Bank to help overcome the divide between creating private incentives for research and development of innovative medicines and ensuring access of the poor to medicine. Fourth, we evaluate these solutions on the basis of utilitarian considerations and urge that equitable pricing is morally preferable to the other solutions.
Developing Countries↗
Trust: the scarcest of medical resources.
In this paper, I claim that the doctor-patient relationship can be viewed as a vessel of trust. Nonetheless, trust within the doctor-patient relationship has been impaired by managed care. When we conceive of trust as social capital, focusing on the role that it plays in individual and social well-being, trust can be viewed as a public good and a scarce medical resource. Given this, there is a moral obligation to protect the doctor-patient relationship from the cost-containment mechanisms that compromise its ability to produce trust.
Attitude to Health↗
Bayer revisited.
Bayer accuses me of wrongly claiming that he holds a negative thesis about the role that the liberal emphasis on privacy rights has had on AIDS public health policy. In his reply to my review essay, he denies holding such a thesis and, moreover, makes the stronger claim that his position is sympathetic to liberalism, or at least to some versions of it. Although I appreciate Bayer's efforts to clarify his views about liberalism and a "culture of restraint and responsibility", it is clear to me that our differences are related not to a misunderstanding on my part, but to a fundamental disagreement concerning what liberalism as a political philosophy is, and what public policy implications it entails in the case of AIDS....
Acquired Immunodeficiency Syndrome↗
Private Acts, Social Consequences by Ronald Bayer (New York: Free Press; 1989).
Bayer's approach is most effective when he uses it to describe the politicized nature of AIDS policy in the United States. He succeeds in showing the reader that public health authorities dealing with the spread of HIV/AIDS had a wide variety of competing interests to take into account in formulating AIDS social policy and that political interest groups, most notably gay community organizations, played a large role in fashioning AIDS policy. Those who might have doubted the significance of contextual factors such as these for health policy, and especially for AIDS policy, will be convinced of it after reading Bayer's book. But Bayer is not content to make only descriptive claims about AIDS health policy. He is also interested in advancing normative and prescriptive claims, the nature of which, I have argued, requires an approach other than the one that he has adopted.
AIDS Serodiagnosis↗