We know that big-pharma hates it, and one of the USA's goals for the TPPA is to gut it.
But how could our government get away with doing that? How would they try to sell it? I got a clue on twitter last night after I corrected Matthew Hooton's claim that "everyone" would benefit from the TPPA. Here is are the lines...
@smalltorquer no suggestion it would be "killed" but currently (for good fiscal reasons) NZers don't have access to all new treatments
— Matthew Hooton (@MatthewHootonNZ) October 26, 2014
So, hell no, we love Pharmac. There is no suggestion of killing it. We just want to enhance it a bit so that "everyone" is better off.
@smalltorquer if it happened, taxpayer may pay more because consumers would have access to more drugs (that pharmac would be forced to buy)
— Matthew Hooton (@MatthewHootonNZ) October 26, 2014
Think for a tick about alternatives to Pharmac. One is that DHBs etc buy their own drugs, so there are multiple buyers. That could still work out OK because each of these buyers would still have a bit of market power, and it'd give NZ a solid response to any claim that Pharmac was unfair under world trade rules (if we felt the need to respond). But this would be perhaps even worse for big-Pharma - all those individual buyers to schmooze.
Far better, for big-Pharma, to have one "regulator" and make it utterly captured. So keep Pharmac but remove its ability to make it's own choices. Brilliant.