As one of Canada’s leading research-based pharmaceutical companies, Lilly makes significant contributions in capital investments in Canada and operates within a knowledge-driven industry that’s helping to improve Canada’s global competitiveness.
More importantly, we have the privilege of directly impacting the health and well-being of people across the country. With this position comes a great deal of responsibility. Lilly recognizes the importance of understanding - from all angles – the many domestic and global policy issues affecting our business. We continually explore these issues and ways to appropriately influence them. Our policies and positions on key industry issues stem from our fundamental commitment: to develop and deliver the most effective health care solutions to our customers and patients.
Value of Pharmaceuticals
Eli Lilly Canada supports policies that recognize the value of pharmaceuticals in treating patients and reducing total health care costs. In many instances, pharmaceuticals eliminate the need for surgery and hospitalization, slow or reverse the progress of a disease, prevent a disease from developing, and allow people to return to work sooner. In these ways, innovative pharmaceuticals are a cost-effective tool helping to contain overall health care costs.
We believe that excessive or inappropriate government regulations and controls on pharmaceutical pricing can run the risk of stifling the ongoing innovation that’s necessary to bring the next generation of life-saving drugs to patients. We believe that the best way to fully realize the value of pharmaceuticals is to ensure appropriate prescribing and that patients have access to new innovation. As a result, society benefits as health care solutions become more cost-effective and patients live longer, healthier, and more active lives.
Intellectual Property Protection for Pharmaceuticals
Eli Lilly Canada supports strong and effective protection of intellectual property rights, including patent protection for pharmaceutical products. The pharmaceutical industry is dependent upon this protection, which grants the inventor of a new product an exclusive, yet limited, period in which to develop and market a medicine.
Lilly also supports the recent (2006) amendments to Health Canada’s Food and Drug Regulations, which allows new and innovative drugs eight years of data protection upon approval. Such protection is critical to Canada’s pharmaceutical and biopharmaceutical industry, since, in some instances, new medicines may have a very short patent life left by the time they receive government approval for sale.
Without effective intellectual property protection, pharmaceutical research companies would not be able to recoup the approximately US $1 billion that it takes, on average, to discover and develop each new drug. In this way, the lack of effective intellectual property rights would have a chilling effect on the industry's ability to bring new life-saving drugs to patients around the world.
Access to Medicines and Cost-Containment Measures
Lilly recognizes the need to contain Canada’s rising health care costs; in fact, given our aging population, increasing demands on our health care system, and current economic and budgetary constraints, maximizing the cost-effectiveness of our health care system has never been more important.
We believe that the research-based pharmaceutical industry is part of the solution — not the problem. Innovative medicines, when appropriately integrated with other treatments, can lower overall health care costs by reducing the costs associated with surgeries, hospitalizations, and other burdens of illness.
We believe that governmental efforts to reduce Canadians’ access to new medications and to limit drug prescribing are not ultimately effective because they shift and increase costs in other areas of the health care system.
Moreover, government efforts to artificially control drug prices are counter-productive to the costly innovation taking place in the pharmaceutical industry, as government-mandated price restrictions reduce the return-on-investment needed to continue the costly research and development of new products.
Lilly believes that the competitive market forces that exist in the pharmaceutical industry are the best insurance against excessive drug prices and that access to medicines through provincial, federal and private drug programs should be determined by examining not just a medication’s price, but all the other factors that impact the medication’s ultimate cost-effectiveness and value to the health care system.
Pharmaceutical Advertising in Canada
Lilly believes that health care providers and consumers have a right to have access to information about prescription medications, medical conditions and health care options, and that pharmaceutical advertising can be a useful tool in information-dissemination and awareness-building.
Of course, we also recognize that our industry has a responsibility to ensure that the advertisements we produce meet the highest ethical and legal standards. At Lilly we take this responsibility very seriously and we have implemented stringent internal guidelines – we call them “Good Promotional Practices” - to help ensure that our advertisements are fair, balanced and accurate, and that they fall within the boundaries of all applicable laws and regulations.
While developing our advertising materials, we also work in close consultation with the Pharmaceutical Advertising Advisory Board and/or Advertising Standards Canada to obtain the voluntary approvals and pre-clearance opinions that these agencies provide.
