Improving access to innovative medicines. (Pfizer forum: a world of ideas on public policy).

Trends of the past few years have drawn a great deal of attention to the research-based pharmaceutical industry, both positive and negative. On the positive side, the discovery of breakthrough medicines is making it possible to effectively treat an ever-wider range of health conditions. Increasingly, the substitution of new therapies for less effective and more invasive treatments reduces the cost of being healthy to individuals, to healthcare systems, and to society. As a result of advances in pharmaceutical therapy, people have choices and opportunities for healthy living that were previously unavailable.

The increasing use of medicines, however, has also led to increasing concerns about the affordability of new treatments. The growth in spending on prescription drugs has often been mistaken for growth in prescription prices. For the most part, spending has risen not because of rising prices but because the quantity of medicines people use has increased substantially. Furthermore, as advances in science such as the decoding of the Human Genome lead to further discoveries, and as the world's population ages, pressure for even greater use of medicines is likely to continue. A key challenge of the future will be to assure continued progress in discovering treatments for disease, while at the same time assuring access to needed medicines.

As the world's leading pharmaceutical research company, Pfizer takes a serious interest in these issues. We are concerned for the uninsured and those who cannot afford the medicine they need. We believe that the affordability of medicines must be addressed in a way that will allow people access to needed medicines while at the same time maintaining the incentive to search for new and better treatments and cures. While these issues are appropriately addressed by society at large, we recognize that we have a role to play as well.

Pfizer has a history of introducing our valuable new medicines at reasonable prices and of implementing only modest annual price increases. Over the past decade, after accounting for discounts to federal government buyers and Medicaid, Pfizer's annual price increases in the United States have averaged less than the annual rate of inflation ...