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If you ask yourself who is paying for pharmaceutical innovation today, the answer is that it's the more affluent populations paying for still-patented advanced medicines at the pharmacy, for comprehensive insurance coverage or for a national health system.

Thomas Pogge

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Thomas Pogge
Age: 71
Born: 1953
Born: August 13
Philosopher
Hamburg
Freie und Hansestadt
Thomas Winfried Menko Pogge
Thomas W. Pogge
Asks
Innovation
Pharmaceutical
Stills
Medicine
Populations
Still
Population
Affluent
Today
National
Coverage
Answer
Comprehensive
Health
Advanced
Patented
Answers
Insurance
Pharmacy
System
Paying
Medicines

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It seems far-fetched, even preposterous, to blame the global economic order for the persistence of severe poverty in countries that are ruled by obvious thugs and crooks.
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It is for the poor people's sake, above all, that we urgently need more unity and better organization and need to concentrate our reform efforts in order to really to achieve reforms, one by one.
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Competing companies evolve toward efficiency as the more efficient ones profit and expand while those who fall behind fail. And companies being efficient and profiting under the Health Impact Fund, this is exactly what we want, because the company's profit is directly driven by the health impact its registered products achieve.
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Governments and their hired negotiators are designing the supranational rules and pressing for their adoption and for compliance - and the US government first and foremost. These governments are elected by us, funded by us, acting on our behalf, sensitive to our will, and so, we are not mere bystanders observing the injustice.
Thomas Pogge
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We live in a world where economic positions - income and wealth - are very unevenly distributed, and this leads to the widespread persistence of poverty.
Thomas Pogge
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To make a proper moral appraisal of the prevalence of severe poverty today, we should focus not on comparisons with times past, when the global average income was much lower, but on a comparison with what would be possible in our time, given the current global average income and level of technological and administrative development.
Thomas Pogge
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Given the total income and wealth available in the world today, we could easily overcome poverty, which would require raising the share of the bottom half from three to roughly five percent. Unfortunately, the trend is going in the opposite direction.
Thomas Pogge
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Large multinational corporations, often acting through their industry lobbies, exert a powerful influence on the formulation of domestic rules and on their application - but their influence on supranational institutional design is even larger because it faces practically no opposition there.
Thomas Pogge
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There exist better models of decisionmaking, for the governance of states, corporations and other large organizations, for example in Germany. We need to study such models and promising pathways on which our existing decisionmaking procedures can be gradually reformed.
Thomas Pogge
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America is run by the rich and powerful in their own interest. To an extent that I think is hard to exaggerate, the intellectuals - academics, journalists and so on - are bought off. And that's a big change that happened in the United States in the last 30 or 40 years.
Thomas Pogge
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What we should do is require or at least permit innovators to license their green innovations free of charge in exchange for public payments based on the impact this innovation has on the environment - emissions averted or something of this sort.
Thomas Pogge
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Ordinary people like you and me can achieve very little on their own. We need to build support. Even if you are a thought leader and have some good ideas on how to make the world better, and even if you write five or ten books - that won't have much effect unless you have people who are willing to support your ideas.
Thomas Pogge
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Because present procedures by design favor the affluent, the poor are being increasingly marginalized. And because the poor are so marginalized, they can exert little influence on institutional design decisions. We need to break out of this vicious spiral and create momentum in the opposite direction.
Thomas Pogge
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Severe poverty is getting better by some measures, but it's also becoming ever more scandalous because it is now so easily avoidable.
Thomas Pogge
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I think one big improvement would be if we somehow made it cheaper and easier for developing countries to learn from the sad experience of some of the developed countries, and also from some of the positive experiences we have of building good transportation systems, like high-speed rail.
Thomas Pogge
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Large companies are very good at solving extremely complex problems in a globally optimal way.
Thomas Pogge
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Some of the developing-country governments and populations are tired of having things rammed down their throats, but we're not yet at the stage we want to get to, namely where the developing countries join forces with one another on behalf of creative alternative ideas about how to take things forward.
Thomas Pogge
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Whatever we, as prospective participants unaware of our specific features, would desire society to be like is what, morally speaking, we ought to institute.
Thomas Pogge
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For the present system to work, poor people must be excluded from the innovation, because if they could get access at an affordable price, then affluent people would find ways to buy it cheaply as well - and then the innovator would be poorly rewarded and introductions of new medicines would decline.
Thomas Pogge
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Our Supreme Court has lifted the practice of buying legislation to the level of a constitutional principle by repeatedly protecting corporate spending for and against political candidates, as well as promises and threats of such spending to bribe and blackmail such candidates, by appeal to the free-speech clause of the First Amendment.
Thomas Pogge