The Price of Life
The Bottom Line
BBC
4.6 • 615 Ratings
🗓️ 7 July 2016
⏱️ 28 minutes
🧾️ Download transcript
Summary
It's hard to put a value on a human life. When you're well, perhaps you don't think about it. But if you're ill, getting access to the right drugs, whatever the cost, is a priority. But the NHS does not have a bottomless pit of money. And some medicines are judged too expensive to be freely available, so patients miss out on treatments that could save or extend their lives. There are usually two villains of the piece: The drugs companies for charging too much; the NHS for not stumping up the cash. In this edition, Evan Davis and guests explore how pharmaceutical companies price their drugs, the role of the NHS in deciding how much the medicines are worth and, in the case of generic or non-branded drugs, they'll ask whether competition is working properly to keep down the NHS medicines bill.
Guests: Erik Nordkamp, Managing Director, Pfizer UK
Carole Longson, Director of the Centre for Health Technology Evaluation at NICE, the National Institute for Health and Care Excellence
Warwick Smith, Director-General, British Generic Manufacturers Association
Producer: Sally Abrahams.
Transcript
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| 0:00.0 | Thank you for downloading this program. |
| 0:02.6 | In this edition of the bottom line, the price of life, |
| 0:06.1 | how drugs companies and the NHS decide on the price of prescription medicines. |
| 0:11.6 | Hello and welcome to the program. |
| 0:14.1 | We're looking at the pricing of pharmaceuticals today. |
| 0:16.6 | It's a fraught issue, trying to balance the immediate needs of patients and taxpayers |
| 0:20.8 | with our long-term desire to give pharmaceutical companies a reasonable return |
| 0:25.1 | and, crucially, an incentive to invest and innovate. |
| 0:29.2 | It sounds straightforward, but let's be clear what that means in practice is |
| 0:33.2 | that when weighing up those conflicting interests, there may be, indeed there will be, |
| 0:38.3 | cancer patients for whom life-extending treatments exist, but who may not get them, even if they're |
| 0:44.0 | cheap to produce. Pricing drugs is an economic and business problem that really matters. |
| 0:50.3 | Well, in this country, there are usually two villains of the piece. The drugs companies for |
| 0:53.5 | charging too much, or the NHS, for not stumping up the cash. |
| 0:57.6 | So how do the company set prices and does the NHS drive a hard enough bargain? |
| 1:03.3 | My three guests today come from different parts of the drugs ecosystem. |
| 1:09.3 | And first up, Eric Nordkamp, managing director of Pfizer-Uk. Tell us a little bit |
| 1:14.0 | about just how big Pfizer is as a global corporation. We have about 100,000 employees worldwide. If you |
| 1:21.8 | look at our worldwide revenues, we're about 50 billion dollars. We operate in 160 countries, so almost every country. And in terms of |
| 1:30.5 | profitability, I mean, just roughly, out of the 50 billion of sales, what's the sort of headline |
| 1:34.9 | profit figure? That's about 13 billion. 13, which sounds quite high on 50 billion. That's a 26% |
| 1:42.9 | return on sales. Now, that's a 26% return on sales. |
... |
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