The new US health secretary, Tom Price, is soaked in big pharma interests. In Europe, medical companies heavily lobby policymakers and health budgets are exploding. Therefore Parliament's report on access to medicine comes at the best possible time.
The report is an important step towards better health care and repairing the dysfunctional pharmaceutical market. In theory, innovation prices should ideally balance themselves on liberal free market conditions. But in fact, this creates huge profits for the few, and small and rare therapeutic progress, as well as many non-registered side-effects that we rarely hear about.
Medicines are important to the survival and longevity of most of us. All EU member states have reiterated their commitment to the right to health and to an appropriate and continued supply of medicinal products.
Research in new medicines since the invention of penicillin has revolutionised our lives, increased survival rates and our perception of a healthy life. EU and national legislation promote research and innovation of medicines to cure and improve the lives of patients with diseases we never thought we could cure only decades ago.
We all want to live long and have healthy lives and we wish the same for others. We expect governments to provide for efficient treatment in case we fall ill - preferably with the safest and most recent cures. Health is a matter of life and death, not of finance and market.
And, thanks to public health systems, price does not matter so much since we normally only pay very little for our medicines and almost never the full price directly. Everyone should have access, regardless of their social status.
However, this means that prices for medicines are inelastic - producers can charge whatever they want - and we as patients will demand that our governments pay whatever it takes to cure our loved ones.
In order to encourage innovation and the best possible conditions for research and development of new drugs, for too long most legislators had blind faith in medical companies' willingness and ability to cure widespread, life threatening and even milder lifestyle diseases.
But in fact, the therapeutic value of new drugs is rarely estimated and too often outweighed by side-effects. More and more public money is spent on sales and marketing rather than on research and development.
And research is focused on the diseases that are most 'profitable' to industry, such as cancer, arthritis and hepatitis C - not on new cures for MRSA, treatments of rare diseases and other 'non-profitable' segments of the 'disease market'.
According to the OECD, three quarters of health spending is public. The public sector also funds at least 30 per cent of all global pharmaceutical research. Still, we leave it up to the private sector to decide which research it carries out.
Also pharmaceutical companies do not have to share their research with the public sector nor with competitors that could further develop new medicines based on these results. Hence, the same research is repeatedly financed largely by the public sector.
No such distortion exists in any other sector. The prices of new medicines have skyrocketed over the last ten years. Health expenditure has outpaced economic growth and again, according to the OECD, many medicines will become unaffordable even for advanced economies in a few decades if we don't slow down the upward price trend. Since medical companies have no incentive to stop the imbalance, we as legislators have to take action.
With our own-initiative report on EU options for improving access to medicines, we aim to tackle problems experienced in all member states - whether in Spain and Greece where some patients suffer from the lack of medicines, or in Denmark and the Netherlands where money goes to more and more expensive medicine rather than to healthcare professionals or to prevention.
I do not blame private companies for making money, but the exorbitant profits of pharmaceutical companies that we see today are at the expense of healthcare budgets, and ultimately patients and are unacceptable.
One of the areas where we see patients suffering are rare, overlooked diseases where the medicines that do exist, are extremely expensive and treatments are often unsafe.
With our report, we encourage more transparency in price setting. We want to know what goes to research and development and what goes to marketing including lobbying.
Today, medical companies prefer to negotiate with each healthcare authority separately in order to set higher price levels higher. We therefore encourage member states to work together for transparent and fair medicine prices.
We emphasise that the compulsory licensing can and should be taken in use when essential medicines are too expensive for governments to provide to patients.
Our report is one of many initiatives on the way towards a better functioning pharmaceutical market. The EU is still one of the largest and most important markets for medicines.
If we work together towards better and fairer pricing, higher therapeutic value and more transparency in price setting, research and side effects we can set the example for the rest of the world.
This will benefit patients, health budgets and of course not least, the pharmaceutical industry's tarnished reputation.