INTRODUCTION: INTELLECTUAL PROPERTY RIGHTS VERSUS HEALTHCARE RIGHTS

The most controversial ethical and public policy issues involving the pharmaceutical industry arguably derive from the dynamic tension between healthcare's dual status as an economic commodity and a moral right. Fundamentally, this tension is an ongoing dialogue about competing rights, i.e., property rights versus the right to affordable healthcare. This section considers the conflicts arising from the pharmaceutical industry's assertion of strong intellectual property rights and the attempts by some advocates to erode these rights in order to honor the right to affordable access to drugs.

A recurring theme of this book has been the disjunction that sometimes exists between public health needs and the profit-maximizing behavior of pharmaceutical companies. In the case of intellectual property this disjunction is not only a function of free-market dynamics; it is also a result of deliberate government intervention. The patent system is a not-so-finely tuned government regulatory mechanism that can, in effect, ratchet up the intensity of this gap. Patent laws grant state-protected monopolies to inventors in order to spur innovation. The exercise of those patent rights, however, also leads to higher prices and limited access.

Some industry leaders well understand that the fates of their companies are inextricably bound with the healthcare needs of the communities in which they operate. In his chapter, William Weldon, the CEO of Johnson & Johnson, one of the world's largest diversified healthcare companies with significant interests in the pharmaceutical industry, argues that the fundamental source of tension between industry and society is a “basic conflict: between funding priorities for providing access to current healthcare, and the need to provide incentives for developing better treatments in the future.