The paramount barrier in the right to healthcare for all, regardless of their capacity to pay and the gravity of their ailment, is the tension between the pursuit of profits and ensuring healthcare.

Nowhere is this more dramatically manifest than in the powerful global pharmaceutical industry, which, with its close links with governments, especially in high-income countries, charges sky-high – and some would say extortionist – prices for medicines critical to saving lives.

These high prices make medicines unaffordable for the impoverished unless governments subsidise them. People get sicker and die not because treatment does not exist, but because big pharma has pushed these outside their reach.

A third of global health spending is out of the shallow and often torn pockets of patients. Studies reveal that the single item on which people spend the most money is medicines. This makes the high monopoly prices of essential medicines, levied by big pharmaceutical companies, a leading cause of driving people into poverty and destitution, besides of preventable illness and deaths often in millions.

Frequently, the argument in favour of patents in the pharmaceutical sector is that without this there would be no profit incentive for research and development.

To understand the desperate need for affordable medicines to save millions of lives,...

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