Obama working to make medication more expensive

[Quantum Windbag]

It seems that "Change we believe in" has found another Bush era policy he likes. Not only that, it lets him help out the pharmaceutical companies that helped him pass Obamacare.

The United States and the European Union are using a United Nations High Level Meeting on Non-Communicable Diseases (NCDs) to effectively renegotiate a landmark agreement on intellectual property rights and public health.
What is at stake is an interpretation of the diseases covered by a 2001 WTO agreement that says that intellectual property rights should be implemented in a manner that promotes "access to medicine for all." The issue is whether the UN recognizes the relevance of the Doha Declaration on TRIPS and Public Health, which was negotiated on November 14, 2001, during a contentiousness and dramatic WTO ministerial meeting in Doha Qatar. The key language in the 2001 document reads as follows:
4. We agree that the TRIPS Agreement does not and should not prevent members from taking measures to protect public health. Accordingly, while reiterating our commitment to the TRIPS Agreement, we affirm that the Agreement can and should be interpreted and implemented in a manner supportive of WTO members' right to protect public health and, in particular, to promote access to medicines for all. In this connection, we reaffirm the right of WTO members to use, to the full, the provisions in the TRIPS Agreement, which provide flexibility for this purpose.
The 2001 Doha Declaration came about largely because of the very visible crisis surrounding access to patented medicines to treat AIDS. The Bush Administration and the European Commission sought to narrow the understanding about health and intellectual property so it only applied to AIDS, or a limited set of infectious diseases. That effort failed in 2001 and again in 2003, during an interpretation of another section of the agreement. Since then, the U.S. and the European Commission have generally accepted references to the Doha Declaration on TRIPS and Public Health in World Health Resolutions, such as WHA61.21, in 2008, and in several bilateral and regional trade agreements, including in the final text of the Anti-Counterfeiting Trade Agreement (ACTA), which was completed in December of 2010. However, in a number of cases, the US and the EU have also asserted that the Doha Declaration is in fact limited to AIDS, infectious diseases or epidemics. These backtracking interpretations have always been strategic, when the US and the EU wanted to push back against a developing country effort to use compulsory licensing of patents for anything other than drugs for AIDS.

Obama Administration Wants to Eliminate References to Doha Declaration in UN Political Declaration on Non-Communicable Diseases | Knowledge Ecology International