Imagine if you got paid to do the right thing. For holding the door open for an old lady . For stopping to let someone cross the street. We don’t always do these things because there is no incentive for us other than doing a nice thing  for someone else. Pharmaceutical drug manufacturers live in the same kind of world:

Currently, funding for drug innovation is based on people in rich countries paying taxes and drug insurance premiums to cover the exorbitant costs. Unfortunately, to sustain this system, poor people get excluded – and the world is mainly comprised of poor people.

Those are the words of Aidan Hollis, associate professor of economics at the University of Calgary pointing out that profit-driven pharmaceutical companies have no incentive to develop drugs for the world’s poorest people because those people can’t pay for them. And it’s not like it’s cheap to develop drugs in the first place.

Hollis and Thomas Pogge (professor of philosophy and international affairs at Yale) have come up with a way to make profit equal access to drugs for the world’s poor. They call it the Health Impact Fund.

The idea is simple enough. A company agrees to sell their drug at cost in as many markets as possible and in exchange they get “a stream of payments based on the assessed global health impact of its drug.” In other words, the more lives the drug saves or improves, the more money company gets. Profit and health go hand in hand.

The real question, of course, is who’s going to pay for this? Hollis and Pogge’s answer is goverments. I heard Pogge speak last week at the 33rd annual Osler Lecture at McGill and he pointed out that, in terms of global GDP, the six billion dollars they want to secure for the fund is rather small. And, he added, it’s not as if this is a charity. Contributing countries will also benefit from lower drugs prices of the drugs registered in the Health Impact Fund which will reduce health care and insurance costs. Also, if the Fund is successful, it will reduce the need for foreign aid.

What I like most about this idea is that it’s using the incentive structure that is already in place in pharmaceutical companies to the advantage of those it had previously neglected.

To read more about this check out the Health Impact Fund site as well as a great article written by one of the world’s most famous contemporary philosophers Peter Singer.