Innovation, price segmentation and medicine access

There is one big difference between analysts from government health ministries or departments, WHO, WB, UN, other foreign aid or tax-funded agencies, and those from private, free market think tanks: The former do not put strong emphasis, if any, medicines and other health innovation, Everything for them is access and affordability. Once you solve the problems of access and affordability to the poor, many other solutions will follow.

If medicine and healthcare (or any other sector) innovation is left unharrassed and unburdened with super-strict regulations and IPR confiscation, price and product competition, and price and product segmentation or differentiation, will follow. This is because as medicine innovators produce more powerful, more revolutionary and more effective and safe medicines, they will be forced to sell the less powerful and predecessor medicines at a discount, to capture the bigger and plentier markets and consumers at very low profit margins, and capture the smaller but richer consumers at very high profit margins via the new and more powerful medicines. This way, access by the poor, affordability for the poor, is addressed, while desire by the richer segments of society for more powerful medicines, even at very high prices (our personal health is priceless, right?), wil also be addressed.

Economists from the WHO, the Center for Global Development (CGD), other institutions are bright people with PhDs. They understand perfectly the role of price segmentation and price differentiation in addressing supply problems in various sets or sections of consumers. But since they are indebted to politicians who appropriate and allocate them with tax money, they can somehow fall into health politicization, if not health socialism, perspective, by the politicians and funding governments.