The Health Impact Fund: a new paradigm in pharmaceutical innovation Authors Thomas Pogge Department of Philosophy, Yale University, New Haven, CT, USA Abstract We have learned that the speed and quality of innovation can be substantially raised by granting innovators temporary monopolies, such as patents or copyrights, which enable them to profi t by charging high mark-ups. But such temporary monopolies promote innovation at the expense of diff usion. In other words, the better we innovate, or incentivize innovation, the more we pay a price in terms of the diff usion of those same innovations. Rewarding innovation in the wrong way in the areas of pharmaceu ticals, food production, and environmental innovation has especially serious eff ects on the poor. The current system does poorly with regard to access targeting and cost-eff ectiveness. The Health Impact Fund proposes a new way of paying for pharmaceutical innovation by incentivizing the development and delivery of new drugs through pay-for-performance mechanisms. Furthermore, the same idea could be applied to agricultural and environmental innovation. Keywords: Health Impact Fund; healthcare · pharmaceutical industry; innovation; patents; agriculture; environment; population growth Downloads PDF Issue Vol. 10 No. 1 (2014) Section Distinguished lectures License This work is subject, unless the contrary is indicated in the text, the photographs or in other illustrations, to an Attribution —Non-Commercial— No Derivative Works 3.0 Creative Commons License, the full text of which can be consulted at http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc-nd/3.0/. You are free to share, copy, distribute and transmit the work provided that the author is credited and reuse of the material is restricted to non-commercial purposes only and that no derivative works are created from the original material.
