Médecine Sans Frontières? (Medicine Without Borders?) The CDC reports show that in 2010, 48 million Americans, many of them seniors, despite large generic drug availability, could not take their prescribed medications due to their high costs (Mukherjee). Costs are expected to rise each year, with no end in sight. Some have proposed a public interest policy allowing Americans to reimport prescription drugs at lower costs from Canada. While this would relieve Americans’ wallets, without direct FDA supervision, this could be dangerous. American drug companies’ resulting decreased budgets could potentially cancel future innovation and R&D projects, ultimately leaving even more people unhealthy. In the U.S., drugs are sold on a free market basis. However, instead of competing against other companies for best-pricing scenarios (bringing lower prices to consumers), pharmaceutical companies price products based on the value to the patient. (How much would you pay to cure your cancer?) This makes baseline prices higher (as much as 80x greater now for drugs purposely kept in short supply, in order to create a higher profit margin) (Ungar). The drug Kalydeco, used for treating cystic fibrosis, costs close to $300,000.00 per year (Werth). Big pharmaceutical companies pay companies not to produce generics of their medications—a process called “Pay for Delay”. Fought by the FTC and ruled against by the Supreme Court, both authorities admit that the SCOTUS’s decision was a symbolic one, and the process is expected to continue (Wyatt). Pharmaceutical companies are re-patenting drugs by repackaging or making minute changes, disallowing them to be released to the generic market. Prices are set dependent on the purchaser. Cheaper prices are give... ... middle of paper ... ...allenge. Setting staff, curriculum, and processes would require a lot of time, money, and dedication. There would be push-back from pharmaceutical companies and lobbies, as well as fast-food and processed food industries. Socially, it will take quite some time (perhaps decades) for people to understand and accept the new policies and focus on healthy lifestyles. While there are concerns about mail-order pharmacies and the process of reimportation, I believe that it is a viable option to help Americans with their prescription costs. The stranglehold that big pharma has on this country needs to be broken, and American principle of free market economics needs to be reinstated. In a country as great as ours, it is a sad day when citizens have to choose between food and prescriptions (or worse: life or death), especially when we have immediate help just over the border.
On 29th May 2013, three gunmen and a suicide bomber attacked the ICRC office at Jalalabad in Afghanistan killing an Afghan guard on duty. Two days after the attack on the world’s most respected humanitarian organisation’s office, Taliban denied any role in the attack. Taliban spokesperson said that the group never targets those who truly serve the people (Reuters, The Express Tribune, May 31, 2013). This attack sent shockwaves across the humanitarian community, not because that ICRC was never attacked
NGO & Microcredit NGO An NGO (non-governmental organization) is a normal people/citizen-based organization that works independently from the government. An NGO is usually made up from mostly volunteers, who work because they want to help normal people like themselves. Even though an NGO is independent it is transparent which means the governments can see what they are doing. The reason this needs to be done is because the NGO can be putting all the money they get in their own pockets instead of
1. Preamble The assignment will cover humanitarian logistics operations in the international disaster relief system (IDRS) and the relevant actors and stakeholders involved within the system. It will also focus on the challenges of humanitarian logistics and how coordination and cooperation amongst humanitarian organisations can overcome these challenges and improve humanitarian operations within the international disaster relief system. 2. Introduction During the past decade there has been an increasing