Comment

Is it fair for the government to pressure companies to provide compassionate access to new therapies when their own formal evaluation processes appear to be showing very little urgency when it comes to patient access?

The irony of the Department of Health's publication of its gift register is not the nature of what has been disclosed - but the fact it justified redacting the identities of gifters using the very same argument it now refuses to accept from companies wanting to protect commercial-in-confidence clinical data.

The published outcomes from the July PBAC meeting suggest the committee may be further evolving how it makes decisions.

The prime minister's characterisation of 'policy' versus 'implementation' works in theory but how does it apply to a program like the PBS?

The pharmaceutical sector might contemplate history as the negotiation of the Seventh Community Pharmacy Agreement gets underway - the last three agreements have all been associated with billion-dollar PBS price reforms.

One of the more spurious and naive arguments proffered by the industry's antagonists and even some people in government is that the pricing of new treatments should reflect whether public funding contributed in any way to its development.

If we start with the objective of providing equitable access to these therapies, how they are evaluated is only one question. In fact, in the emerging era of personalised medicine, it may be the easiest question to answer.

Governments can add more and more consumers to committees and processes - it will be largely pointless without reform of current decision-making frameworks.

Department of Health officials would simply give an organisation the option of sticking with an industry MoU or being involved in the negotiation - in the end, it would probably be a very simple choice.

According to Martin Palin, the CEO of Palin Communications, despite a recent court ruling the benefits to pharmaceutical companies of engaging in social media far outweigh the risks.

The nature of 'positioning' and being 'positioned' is one of the main challenges any stakeholder group will face in dealing with policy-makers on reform.

The Coalition gave itself a nine-month window from the election to launch the review, so there is plenty of time, and stakeholders will likely prefer to wait if it means the sector has resolved other potential distractions from what could be a generational opportunity for the biopharmaceutical and wider therapeutics sector.