In the UK and across the world, patients are being denied medicines because of a system that prioritizes profits before lives. Labour announced bold policies this week to tackle the immediate crisis in medicines prices as well as transform a fundamentally broken system and re-orientate it to serve public health.

For decades, “Big Pharma” has decided what medicines get produced and who gets them. They can get away with charging the highest prices because new drugs are awarded twenty-year patents which mean that no other company can make or sell that drug during that period. With no competition, they can charge whatever price they like. 

High prices have long been a problem for low and middle income countries but in recent years, prices are so high that rich countries like the UK are also struggling to afford these extortionate rates. Our National Health Service increasingly has to ration or reject effective treatments because they are just too expensive.