CENTER FOR HEALTH LAW AND POLICY INNOVATION OF HARVARD LAW SCHOOL SHARES FINDINGS DEMONSTRATING THE IMPORTANCE OF NATIONAL HEALTH REFORM

via law.harvard.edu

PRESS RELEASE

Fact sheet offers findings that show the benefits of health reform as U.S. Supreme Court Rules on Patient Protection and Affordable Care Act (ACA)

JAMAICA PLAIN, MASS. – The Center for Health Law and Policy Innovation of Harvard Law School (the Center), applauds today’s U.S. Supreme Court ruling on the Patient Protection and Affordable Care Act (ACA), which upheld the constitutionality of the individual mandate and of the Medicaid expansion, but with limits that have the potential to significantly undermine the Medicaid expansion. The Center has recently found that similar health reforms in Massachusetts have led to significant individual and public health benefits.

“Here in Massachusetts, we have demonstrated that health reforms result in increased access to needed care and treatment for our most vulnerable residents, including individuals with HIV and other chronic illnesses,” said Robert Greenwald, director of the Center.

The Center has released a fact sheet that highlights some of the findings of an upcoming report on health reform in Massachusetts.  The findings demonstrate that health reforms similar to those included in the ACA lead to significant health benefits.

An individual mandate that requires most adults to carry health insurance, a voluntary Medicaid expansion, and subsidized private health insurance for low-to-moderate income uninsured residents are key reforms included in the ACA that have been in place in Massachusetts since 2006. These initiatives contribute greatly to the following outcomes:

• Between 2006 and 2009, new HIV diagnoses fell by 25 percent in Massachusetts compared to a 2 percent national increase.

• Between 2002 and 2008, Massachusetts’ AIDS mortality rates decreased by 44 percent compared to 33 percent nationally. 

Along with these important health outcomes, the Massachusetts Medicaid program has seen decreased inpatient costs for this population, and the Massachusetts Department of Public Health estimates that it has saved over $1.5 billion in HIV health care costs since the reforms, in part due to decreased HIV transmission.

A working draft of the Massachusetts HIV/AIDS Resource Allocation Project is available here.

“Today’s ruling will expand access to care for millions of Americans. However, we are concerned that the Court’s decision that the federal government may not withhold all Medicaid funding for states who choose not to participate in Medicaid expansion will perpetuate unequal access to care and health disparities. It is critical that low-income Americans, including those living with HIV, be able to reap the benefits of health reform,” said Greenwald. He added, “In terms of putting the ACA into action, the devil is in the details. We must continue to advocate to make sure that our federal and state governments implement the ACA in ways that turn the law’s potential for increased access to care into reality.” 

Martha Minow, Dean of Harvard Law School, noted, “We have cleared a major milestone today, but the real work is just beginning. As we know from Massachusetts, the gains did not happen overnight. Now is the time to work to ensure that the Affordable Care Act truly translates into access to care for millions of Americans, including our most vulnerable, and that the many promises of health reform are fulfilled.”

The Center for Health Law and Policy Innovation of Harvard Law School works to increase access to healthcare for vulnerable populations, particularly low-income people with chronic illness, as well as to support legal, regulatory, and policy structures that enable people to make healthy lifestyle choices.

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SUPREME COURT RULING ON AFFORDABLE CARE ACT HUGE VICTORY FOR PEOPLE LIVING WITH HIV/AIDS

Press Release via San Francisco AIDS Foundation:

San Francisco, June 28, 2012 — Today the United States Supreme Court delivered a huge victory to nationwide efforts to establish a health care system that works for everyone, including the 1.2 million people living with HIV/AIDS in the United States. By upholding the Affordable Care Act (ACA), today’s decision delivers on the promise of health care for more than 30 million uninsured Americans. The historic ruling also upheld long-overdue protections for people with HIV and other chronic diseases, including safeguards against denial of coverage or exorbitant premiums for the especially sick, and annual and lifetime coverage limits for people with costly medical conditions.

“For the first time in the history of the epidemic, the ACA will dramatically expand health care access to people previously considered ‘uninsurable,’ including millions of Americans with HIV/AIDS and other serious illness,” said Neil Giuliano, CEO of San Francisco AIDS Foundation. “Today, we move one step closer to having a health care system that supports access to care and treatment that prevent illness and disease progression, rather than a ’sick care system‘ that promotes disability and illness by limiting coverage options.”

The Affordable Care Act will address the failings of the current health care system by expanding Medicaid to all low-income people, creating open, competitive, fair marketplaces for uninsured and under insured individuals and families to purchase private insurance, and providing subsidies to lower-income individuals to make insurance affordable. An estimated 1.2 million people are living with HIV in the United States and need access to high-quality, uninterrupted medical care to stay healthy, reduce new HIV infections, and cut long-term health care costs.

“While today’s ruling is a huge victory, there’s no time for rest. We must continue our efforts to educate people affected by HIV about the key components of the ACA and how it will affect access to quality HIV prevention, care, and treatment,“ said Courtney Mulhern-Pearson, director of state and local affairs at San Francisco AIDS Foundation. “It is critically important that all Americans have accurate information about the law, how it will benefit them, and what it means for their health and the health of their communities.”

With today’s historic decision, San Francisco AIDS Foundation will redouble its efforts to ensure that health care reform implementation proceeds full steam ahead. The foundation urges Congress to acknowledge that the Affordable Care Act is the law of the land by fully funding health care reform and ending efforts to repeal it. Progress must not be held hostage by politics.

“Today’s decision underscores the importance of continued funding of the Ryan White CARE Act during this time of transition to health care reform,” said Ernest Hopkins, director of legislative affairs at San Francisco AIDS Foundation. “In order to effectively transition clients and fully realize the promise of health care reform, we must continue our work with elected officials, policy makers, and peer organizations to secure the future of the Ryan White CARE Act.”



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PEPFAR Program Outlines End of Year Progress to the Congress

via Science Speaks, by Meredith Mazzotta

PEPFAR releases 8th annual report to Congress: The U.S. President’s Emergency Plan for AIDS Relief (PEPFAR) program delivered its 8th annual report to Congress recently. The five-page document outlines the program’s progress as of the end of fiscal year 2011 in various areas including:  supporting 3.9 million people on antiretroviral treatment; testing 9.8 million pregnant women for HIV in the course of the year; providing prevention of mother-to-child transmission services to more than 660,000 HIV-infected pregnant women allowing 200,000 babies to be born HIV-free; and providing care and support for nearly 13 million people, including more than 4.1 million orphans and vulnerable children. The report also stressed the importance of “leading with science” as we respond to the pandemic, smart investments including spurring private-sector engagement, country ownership, and shared responsibility.

TB institute confirms 8 patients resistant to all known TB drugs:  According to this article in the Hindustan Times, eight of the 12 patients originally reported as having what was coined “totally” or “extremely” drug resistant TB (neither term is recognized by the World Health Organization) have received confirmatory sputum sample testing that show resistance to all first- and second-line TB drugs. Since the original diagnoses of the dozen patients, three have died and, according to a city TB officer, of the six patients that remain in Mumbai, five are undergoing treatment for extensively drug-resistant TB, and one is being treated at Hinduja hospital.

Nonprofit TB Vaccine Developers Sign MOU to Accelerate Progress: Aeras announced it will be joining with the Tuberculosis Vaccine Initiative (TBVI) to “enhance and strengthen collaborative efforts to advance the world’s most promising TB vaccine candidates.” The memorandum of understanding between the two organizations will work to address opportunities and challenges in TB vaccine development that were outlined in the strategic blueprint released by advocates in late March, and published in the journal Tuberculosis, just before World TB Day. According to the Aeras press release, the two organizations will advise each other on vaccines in development, work to streamline the process of candidate selection and review, as they work together to achieve the goals outlined in the blueprint.

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The Affordable Care Act's Impact on People Living With HIV

via Associated Press, by David Crary

For many HIV-positive Americans, and those who advocate on their behalf, these are days of anxious waiting as the Supreme Court ponders President Barack Obama's health care overhaul.

This loose-knit community — made up of activists, health professionals and an estimated 1.2 million people living with HIV — has invested high hopes in the Affordable Care Act, anticipating that it could dramatically improve access to lifesaving care and treatment. The act is now in limbo as the high court deliberates on its constitutionality, notably its requirement that most Americans obtain health insurance. A ruling could come in June.

"The HIV treatment community sees the act as a critical step in our fight against the AIDS epidemic," said Scott Schoettes of Lambda Legal, a national gay-rights advocacy group. "People have been counting on it, making plans based on its implementation, so for it to be pulled out from under their feet at this point would be a tremendous loss."

Among its many provisions, the health care law has two major benefits for HIV-positive people: It expands Medicaid so that those with low incomes can get earlier access to treatment, and it eliminates limits on pre-existing conditions that have prevented many people with HIV from obtaining private insurance.

Under current policies, low-income HIV-positive people often do not qualify for Medicaid if they are not yet sick enough to be classified as disabled.

In the view of advocacy groups, this creates a cruel Catch 22 — at a stage when they are still active and productive, these people can't afford the antiretroviral treatments that could help them stay that way. Only when their condition worsens are they able to qualify for Medicaid and get treatment that might have prevented the deterioration.


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Statements from New US AIDS Policy Director, Dr. Grant Colfax, Causes Mixed Reactions

via The Colorado Dependent, by Todd A. Heywood

With a president who has declared the end of AIDS is in reach, Dr. Grant Colfax has a massive job in front of him. But his first interview with The American Independent has some activists challenging his take on controversial elements of the epidemic impacting an estimated 1.2 million Americans.

The former director of the San Francisco Department of Public Health HIV programs was appointed by President Barack Obama to run the Office of National AIDS Policy (ONAP), March 14.

In a brief phone interview with The American Independent, Colfax praised the National HIV/AIDS Strategy (NHAS) and said he was looking forward to implementing the plan. NHAS was released by the Obama administration in July of 2010 and is the first time in the 30 year history of the epidemic that the federal government has developed a comprehensive plan to address HIV in the United States.

HIV-specific criminalization

A key segment of the plan calls for addressing HIV-related stigma and discrimination, including addressing the bevy of HIV-specific criminal state laws that activists have identified as stigmatizing.

“Certainly, criminalization is one of the issues we’ll be looking at as we engage stakeholders in a broader conversation about how stigma and discrimination are contributing to HIV risk and core health outcomes,” Colfax said.

Asked what his personal take on criminalization and its impact on the HIV epidemic was, Colfax demurred.

“I think it’s really premature for me to speak specifically about that beyond what I just said,” Colfax said.

That response did not sit will with activists.

“Dr. Colfax’s boiler-plate reaction to the criminalization issue is disappointing,” said Catherine Hanssens, executive director of the Center for HIV Law and Policy, which houses the anti-HIV criminalization group Positive Justice Project. “Prosecuting and incarcerating people with HIV for years and decades for consensual and no-risk conduct is a profoundly serious form of discrimination that has been stigmatizing people with HIV for decades.”

Sean Strub, a board member for the Global Network of People with HIV– North America, was also disappointed.

“To have any discussion about stigma that doesn’t start with removing HIV-specific criminal statutes is hollow,” Strub said. “Those statutes, which create a viral underclass, are the most extreme manifestation of stigma.”

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Activists Protest Against Obama's PEPFAR Budget Cuts

via Plus News

Almost a thousand Swazi and South African HIV activists marched to the United States consulate in Johannesburg on 22 March 2012 to demand that the US continue supporting the Global Fund to Fight AIDS, Tuberculosis (TB) and Malaria, and safeguard funding of its President's Emergency Plan for AIDS Relief (PEPFAR), which US President Barack Obama's latest proposed budget will cut by 12 percent.

The march organizers - a coalition of international and regional HIV organizations, including the global medical charity, Médecins Sans Frontières (MSF), the World AIDS Campaign, and the AIDS Rights Alliance Southern Africa - also called on the British and Australian governments to join their American counterparts in kick-starting a response to solve the Global Fund's financial crisis.

Without an emergency donor meeting, the Fund - already in need of at least US$ 2 billion - will only secure additional funding at its next scheduled replenishment in 2014.

"We're not asking for charity, we are asking for social justice," said Daygan Eagar, a researcher at the South African human rights organization, Section27. "The US spends more money in one day of war than we're asking for the Global Fund."

Representatives from MSF, Section27 and the South African AIDS lobby group, Treatment Action Campaign, were to meet with consular and PEPFAR representatives to discuss their concerns.
The demonstration was also endorsed by the two million-member Congress of South African Trade Unions (COSATU). It followed similar protest action at US representative offices in Swaziland, according to Siphiwe Hlophe, a founder of the NGO, Swaziland for Positive Living (SWAPOL).

"If we are here, if we are laughing, it is because we are on drugs," she told the crowd. "Before the Global Fund we didn't have food, we didn't have pyschosocial support, we didn't disclose our HIV status - that all started when the Global Fund came. Look at how many of us are here today - that is the Global Fund."

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Jim Yong Kim: Obama's Choice for President of the World Bank

via The Washington Post, by By Elizabeth Flock and Hayley Tsukayama

President Obama’s surprise choice to head the World Bank is a physician and a major figure in the global health world.

Jim Yong Kim has served as Dartmouth College’s president for the past three years, but has devoted much of his life to improving health outcomes in the developing world. Obama highlighted Kim’s health development background as major factors in his nomination.

Along with Paul Farmer and others, Kim co-founded Partners in Health, an international health and social justice organization. He served as Director of the World Health Organization’s HIV/AIDS department, where he scaled up treatment, prevention, and care programs in developing countries. He has also worked on international tuberculosis policy.

“Dr. Kim has been a strong supporter of global public health,” said Tarik Jasaveric, a spokesman for the World Health Organization. “At WHO, Dr. Kim was instrumental in creating and implementing the 3 by 5 Initiative, which saw millions of people in the developing world gain access to anti-retroviral Therapy for HIV for the first time.”

The initiative, launched in 2003, sought to treat 3 million new patients infected by the disease by 2005. It reached its goal in 2007, The Washington Post reported. In 2006, he was named as one of Time Magazine’s “100 Most Influential People” for his work on that campaign and his efforts combating drug-resistant tuberculosis in Peru.

Kim also co-founded the Global Health Delivery Project, a joint initiative designed to improve public health in disadvantaged populations by “systematizing the study of global health delivery” and “rapidly disseminating knowledge to practitioners.”

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Dr. Grant Colfax is Appointed Director of White House Offices of National AIDS Policy Position

via PR Newswire

San Francisco AIDS Foundation applauds President Obama's selection of Dr. Grant Colfax to become director of the White House Office of National AIDS Policy. Dr. Colfax is uniquely suited to continue the momentum established under his predecessor, Mr. Jeffrey Crowley, in advancing the ambitious goals outlined in the president's National HIV/AIDS Strategy and moving us closer to an AIDS-free generation.

"Dr. Colfax has been instrumental in the decline of new HIV infections in San Francisco in recent years," said San Francisco AIDS Foundation CEO Neil Giuliano. "His unique blend of experience serving on the front lines of the epidemic, implementing the national strategy at the local level, working as a direct service provider within the Ryan White CARE system, and conducting cutting-edge research makes him the right person at the right time to lead the Obama administration's efforts to end HIV/AIDS in the United States."

The Office of National AIDS Policy provides essential leadership in addressing the U.S. HIV/AIDS epidemic. As director, Dr. Colfax will be required to take a fresh look at how resources can be targeted to reduce HIV infection rates, increase access to treatment, and decrease HIV-associated health disparities related to sexual orientation, race, gender, and socio-economic status in hard-hit communities across the country. His track record in San Francisco demonstrates he is well suited for this challenge.

"Dr. Colfax will play a critical role over the next several years to ensure the implementation of the Affordable Care Act and HIV service integration to address the health care needs of people living with HIV," said Ernest Hopkins, director of legislative affairs at San Francisco AIDS Foundation. "Having worked closely with him on complex issues and having seen his consensus-building skills among diverse populations, including communities of color, I am confident that the AIDS community will have a strong advocate within the administration. I know Dr. Colfax will work to ensure that the coming changes to our health care system are made thoughtfully, carefully, and with a strong focus on improving the health status of the most vulnerable people."

As director of the HIV Prevention and Research Section at San Francisco Department of Public Health, Dr. Colfax elevated the role of community-based health research in local planning and funding decisions and instituted innovative, evidence-based HIV prevention tools, such as measuring and mapping community viral load and enhancing HIV testing and linkage to care, making San Francisco's HIV prevention planning and service system a model for jurisdictions across the nation. When developing the city's most recent HIV prevention plan with diverse stakeholders, Dr. Colfax was mindful to ensure its consistency with the emerging National HIV/AIDS Strategy. Throughout his career, he has maintained his role as a physician at Ward 86 at San Francisco General Hospital, the nation's first HIV/AIDS-specialized clinic.

San Francisco AIDS Foundation stands ready to work with Dr. Colfax, the White House, and other community partners across the country to reduce new HIV infections, increase access to care for all people living with the disease, and reduce HIV-related health disparities.


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Ethical Concerns Raised: Human Experimention Without Subject's Consent

viaNature.com by Matthew Walter

The injections came without warning or explanation. As a low-ranking soldier in the Guatemalan army in 1948, Federico Ramos was preparing for weekend leave one Friday when he was ordered to report to a clinic run by US doctors.

Ramos walked to the medical station, where he was given an injection in his right arm and told to return for another after his leave. As compensation, Ramos's commanding officer gave him a few coins to spend on prostitutes. The same thing happened several times during the early months of Ramos's two years of military service. He believes that the doctors were deliberately infecting him with venereal disease.

Now 87 years old, Ramos says that he has suffered for most of his life from the effects of those injections. After leaving the army, he returned to his family's remote village, on a steep mountain slope northeast of Guatemala City. Even today, Las Escaleras has no electricity or easy access to medical attention. It wasn't until he was 40, nearly two decades after the injections, that Ramos saw a doctor and was diagnosed with syphilis and gonorrhoea. He couldn't pay for medication.

“For a lack of resources, I was here, trying to cure myself,” says Ramos. “Thanks to God, I would feel some relief one year, but it would come back.” Over the decades, he has endured bouts of pain and bleeding while urinating, and he passed the infection onto his wife and his children, he told Nature last month in an interview at his home.

Ramos's son, Benjamin, says that he has endured lifelong symptoms, such as irritation in his genitals, and that his sister was born with cankers on her head, which led to hair loss. Ramos and his children blame the United States for their decades of suffering from venereal disease. “This was an American experiment to see if it caused harm to human beings,” says Benjamin.

Ramos is one of a handful of survivors from US experiments on ways to control sexually transmitted diseases (STDs) that ran in semi-secrecy in Guatemala from July 1946 to December 1948. US government researchers and their Guatemalan colleagues experimented without consent on more than 5,000 Guatemalan soldiers, prisoners, people with psychiatric disorders, orphans and prostitutes. The investigators exposed 1,308 adults to syphilis, gonorrhoea or chancroid, in some cases using prostitutes to infect prisoners and soldiers. After the experiments were uncovered in 2010, Ramos and others sued the US government, and US President Barack Obama issued a formal apology. Obama also asked a panel of bioethics advisers to investigate, and to determine whether current standards adequately protect participants in clinical research supported by the US government.

When details of the Guatemalan experiments came to light, US health officials condemned them as 'repugnant' and 'abhorrent'. Last September, the Presidential Commission for the Study of Bioethical Issues went further, concluding in its report1, that “the Guatemala experiments involved unconscionable violations of ethics, even as judged against the researchers' own understanding of the practices and requirements of medical ethics of the day”

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To End AIDS, We Need a Plan!

via Huffington Post, by Mitchell Warren

Last Thursday (December 1), on World AIDS Day, President Obama threw the full weight of the U.S. government behind a vision that would have seemed outlandish until now: The end of the global AIDS epidemic.

Over the past few years, a string of HIV prevention research breakthroughs has put that ambitious goal within sight for the first time. Voluntary medical male circumcision is the most powerful, under-utilized biomedical HIV prevention strategy available: with a single surgical procedure, men's risk of HIV from female partners is reduced by more than 60 percent. Treatment for HIV positive individuals is also potent prevention -- reducing risk of transmission by up to 96 percent.

These two strategies are the cornerstone of a new era of HIV prevention, and it is critical that the president continue to be a supporter and leader of the chorus of advocates, health and political leaders who are saying "Yes, we can end AIDS."

Now the question is: How will we achieve this goal? What are the priority actions to take today, tomorrow, and years from now?

First and foremost, the resource commitments need to match the strength of the scientific data. Funds are needed to ensure that the most effective prevention is put in place for the people who need it, in programs that meet their needs, with rigorous evaluation of impact so that no dollars are wasted.

President Obama's commitment to expand access to HIV treatment for two million more people by 2013 is a wonderful first step. But his call to the leaders of the world to match the US commitment must be heeded.

Last week, the Global Fund to Fight AIDS, Tuberculosis and Malaria - which supports HIV treatment programs in resource-poor countries along with PEPFAR - announced that it has been forced to curtail new grant-making until2014. The Fund pointed to a drop-off in contributions from governments in the face of the global economic crisis.

There's no question that economies are hurting. But global AIDS programs are among the smartest investments in history: they've saved countless lives and have shifted the course of the epidemic so that annual HIV infections are on a slow but steady decline. In most cases, these efforts represent a tiny share of donor countries' national budgets - for the U.S., it's well under one percent. It is precisely at this moment, when the potential dividends are greatest, that the world's modest AIDS investments should be sustained.

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AIDS Battle Risks Being Derailed by Global Financial Crisis

via Nature, by Meredith Wadman

Thirty years after AIDS was first recognized as a human scourge, major recent gains in treatment and prevention risk being derailed by the global financial crisis.

On 23 November, the Global Fund to Fight AIDS, Tuberculosis and Malaria announced that it will not fund new grants for prevention and treatment until 2014, owing to “substantial budget challenges in some donor countries”. The fund's HIV activities run the gamut from counselling and testing pregnant women in India to providing medications to infected children in Kenya.

And on 7 December, a report from Policy Cures in Sydney, Australia, a group that monitors global research and development for neglected diseases, showed that public and private funders last year cut their commitments to HIV/AIDS research targeted at the developing world by US$67.5 million, or 5.9%. The decline was due entirely to cutbacks by wealthy nations, which slashed spending by $72.6 million; poorer countries actually increased funding by $5.1 million. Where research is concerned, “AIDS had a bigger drop in dollar terms than any other disease”, says Mary Moran, the executive director of Policy Cures and the lead author on the report.

The threat comes even as US President Barack Obama last week promised that the United States will step up its worldwide attack on AIDS. Breaking the White House's past reticence on the issue, he urged nations to honour their unmet pledges to the Global Fund.

“Countries that have committed to the Global Fund need to give the money that they promised,” he said on 1 December, World AIDS Day. “Countries that haven't made a pledge, they need to do so,” he added, singling out emerging nations such as China that are recipients of funds “but now are in a position to step up as major donors”.

The United States has given $6.1 billion to the Global Fund since 2004, and last year pledged to contribute $4 billion between 2011 and 2013. Congress approved $1.05 billion in 2011, meaning that allotments must increase substantially in 2012 and 2013 to honour the pledge. Obama has asked Congress to provide $1.3 billion in 2012, but Senate lawmakers have so far resisted the increase.

Obama pledged to increase by 50% — to 6 million — the number of people receiving antiretroviral therapy (ART) worldwide by 2013 through the President's Emergency Plan for AIDS Relief (PEPFAR), the nation's major global treatment and prevention programme. He also said PEPFAR would aim to provide ART to an additional 1.5 million pregnant women with HIV in the next two years. The international promises came with no new money immediately attached. But Obama has asked Congress to provide nearly $7.2 billion — a 6% increase — for PEPFAR in 2012, part of the unfinished budget bills still being debated.

Advocates said that his speech marked a significant turning point. “This is the first time he's signalled that he's going to champion global HIV in this way,” says Jennifer Cohn, an assistant professor of infectious diseases at the University of Pennsylvania in Philadelphia, and a policy adviser in Nairobi for Médecins Sans Frontières (MSF; also known as Doctors Without Borders). “Whether or not this gets translated into the president's 2013 budget request, or what Congress chooses to protect during the 2012 budget negotiations — that's what I'm waiting to hear.”

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The 96 Percent Campaign: How Obama Can Help End the AIDS Crisis

via RealityCheck, by Matthew Kavanagh

President Obama has repeatedly stressed his administration’s commitment to science as one way to distinguish his leadership from that of his predecessor.  Right now that commitment is being put to the test on HIV and AIDS: if the President could do more to  end the crisis, would he?

A revolutionized response to the global AIDS crisis has just been made possible with the August publication of a US-funded study showing that antiretroviral AIDS medicines (ARVs) can cut the risk of HIV transmission from an infected to a non-infected partner  by 96 percent. Not only do AIDS drugs save lives—they are among the most powerfully effective prevention tools.

This double-benefit changes the equation in fighting AIDS at home and abroad and raises the question: Will the Obama administration respond?

That is why we are launching The 96% Campaign making clear the choice the President faces between action and inaction. AIDS treatment is not just science—it’s a reproductive, economic, and racial justice issue.

The Obama administration has had a decidedly mixed record on AIDS treatment. Now, the science and our communities are asking: Will he step up?

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Obama Pushes More Competition on Biologic Drugs

via The New York Times, by Andrew Pollack

President Obama is not giving up when it comes to trying to introduce competition to expensive drugs made by biotechnology.

Tucked into the president’s deficit reduction plan released on Monday was a proposal to reduce the market exclusivity offered to brand-name biologic drugs to seven years, down from the 12 incorporated in the 2010 federal health care legislation.

That would allow so-called generic versions of such drugs to reach the market sooner, saving an estimated $3.5 billion in federal health spending over 10 years, or a little over one-tenth of 1 percent of the $3 trillion the president’s deficit reduction plan is supposed to save in a decade.

Biologic drugs are proteins made in living cells, like Avastin and Herceptin for cancer and Enbrel and Humira for rheumatoid arthritis. Such drugs can cost tens of thousands of dollars a year and are not subject to the same rapid onset of generic competition as drugs made in chemical factories, like Lipitor and Prozac.
The issue was a thorny one during the debate in Congress over the health care legislation.

The biotechnology industry argued it needed 12 years of freedom from lower priced competition to recoup research and development costs. Any less, it argued, would retard innovation. The generic industry, as well as many insurers and employers who pay health care bills, said a much shorter period would suffice.

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