Drug Deals

Drug
deals

By Stuff Circuit

Each year, hundreds of millions of dollars in secret money washes back and forth in a multi-million dollar drug market

And it's
all
legal

Last year in New Zealand, it was worth

The amount is growing
and growing

The payments from pharmaceutical companies are called:

REBATES

A practice Big Pharma uses globally to disguise the real price of medicines

Watch how it works and see why Big Pharma has all the
control

Not only is the total amount of rebates increasing, they've also grown steeply as a proportion of what Pharmac spends

Why?

But why is that? And why the confidentiality? Watch this video to see what the drug companies' representative says

There are some ways that agencies like Pharmac can get back some power

Including talking to each other without disclosing the confidential parts of the deals

Pharmac also makes public what drugs contracts have rebate clauses

And there's something else: Pharmac has the power to walk away

But academics who study pharmaceutical pricing remain worried about the confidential process. In this paper...

Sabine Vogler, of the Austrian Public Health Institute, and Kenneth Paterson of the University of Glasgow

argue countries like New Zealand are in a
'Prisoner's Dilemma'

If they all band together and fight the confidentiality of prices, it could ultimately benefit everyone

but it may well bring short-term disadvantage to some