Eli Lilly CEO John Lechleiter, in an editorial to the Wall Street Journal and a speech to the US Chamber of Commerce has makes a very compelling argument against single payer healthcare and the need to continued innovation.
· First we cannot ignore history; individual life expectancy has increased by over 20/life years since 1928 from an average of 57 to 78. Of the increase in life expectancy in the last 20 years, new medicines accounted for 40% of the increase.
· We should not ignore the facts, ie record spending ($58 billion) on research by bio-pharmaceutical companies and record numbers of new medications in human clinical trials (861). In the last four years the FDA has approved the fewest number of drugs (78) than in any time in recent history.
Unfortunately innovation may be written out of the health care reform debate. With the economy in trouble and the loss of capital to create new products we may see stark reductions in innovation. At the same time single payer, and rationing of health care will further push down innovation.
He lays out three ways to continue innovation under universal access:
· Access to open health care markets. We need to be able to put our innovations to the test among doctors and patients. This means that doctors and patients need to keep the ability to choose, in an informed way, from all of the available alternatives.
· Market-based pricing, based on competition among therapies, undistorted by government interventions. We need to be able to get a return on our investment that reflects a real-world assessment of the value we’re delivering.
· Intellectual property protection. We need to be able to retain ownership, for some reasonable period of time, of the discoveries that our investors have risked so much on bringing to market.
The White House and Congress would do well in considering that prior to changing our whole system of health care delivery (where doctors will take the brunt of the pain), that innovation is a very delicate commodity. Any changes should be required to pass the innovation test.
John Lechleiter: Wall Street Journal