We believe that unlike almost any other industry, the pharmaceutical industry has an obligation that goes beyond business: it must balance its profit objectives against the need to make its medicines available to most number of patients.
The reason is self-evident: we as a pharmaceutical company have the power to save lives. A widget maker doesn’t have this power, nor the obligation; it may simply manufacture and sell its products at prices and volumes that optimize its profit, a perfectly fine business objective, which doesn’t have any bearing on the conditon of human health. But for a pharmaceutical company to solely focus on maximizing profit can potentially deprive lives that can be saved. We with the power to save lives have a social and moral obligation because of the nature of our business, and at Paradigm we take it very seriously.
We are of course just one part in the chain of healthcare providers that influence the patient’s ability to afford treatment and care. At Paradigm, we strive to do our part. We look at affordability as a critical benchmark in pricing our products. For critical medicines, commensurate with our ability we offer them free or at cost under our Patient Access Program to those who are severely economically disadvantaged.
It is one of our missions to collaborate with hospitals to provide critical drugs, such as cancer medicines, at cost or deep discounts in some of the poor regions where we have business operations. We are partnering with manufacturers to obtain products at low costs from them, so we can pass on the savings to our patients.