This paper evaluates the cost-effectiveness of vaccinating women against human papillomaviruses (HPV) in the Czech Republic, where HPV is the main cause of most cervical carcinomas. It examines the cost-effectiveness of the current reimbursement policy for HPV vaccination compared to the...

As a key component of health care, a full understanding of how much is spent on prescription medicines is increasingly important. Only a partial understanding of total expenditures across health systems is currently possible, as reporting is often limited to medicines dispensed in community...

In a sign of their increasing frustration with global efforts to ensure that all people everywhere will have access to COVID-19 vaccines, several developing countries have asked other members of the World Trade Organization (WTO) to join them in a sweeping waiver of the intellectual property...

Canada's Patented Medicines (Notice Of Compliance) Regulations fail to achieve the intended purpose of balancing innovation with timely generic market entry. An examination of the inefficiencies created by the Canadian regulations reveals that key features of U.S. pharmaceutical law should be...

Biologic drugs represent an important category of drugs that improve health outcomes in this country. Yet, these cutting-edge drugs are often prohibitively costly, preventing access for many Americans. Recognizing the need for more affordable, generic substitutes for biologic drugs — or...

This study examines the relationship between pharmaceutical R&D and health care expenditures, distinguishing between the short- and long-run impacts. To measure these relationships quantitatively, we focus on patents as a key factor driving the costs of pharmaceuticals, and develop a structured...

I assess the impact that pharmaceutical innovation had on cancer mortality in Mexico during the period 2003–2013, by investigating whether there were larger declines in the age-standardized mortality rate of cancer sites (breast, lung, colon, etc.) that were subject to more pharmaceutical...

An analysis of the consumption of prescription pharmaceuticals and the structure of pharmaceutical care costs has demonstrated that the availability of pharmaceuticals is still low, and that households have to pay for more than half of those costs. It has also been revealed that availability of...

This WTO working paper studies availability and affordability of new and innovative pharmaceuticals in a post-TRIPS era. The WTO's TRIPS Agreement (TRIPS) makes it obligatory for WTO members − except least-developed country members (LDCs) - to provide pharmaceutical product patents with a...

In this paper we investigate the effects of introduction of lump sum copayments on the utilization of prescription drugs by elderly patients. We make use of an unique dataset and analyze the policy change that implemented patient cost-sharing in the Czech Republic starting in 2008. After the...