Position on Key Issues

As a world leader in the research-based pharmaceutical industry, Lilly recognizes the importance of understanding a wide array of domestic and global policy issues affecting our business. We continually explore these issues and ways to identify, analyze and influence them. The policies that result from this process support our commitment to create and deliver the most effective health care solutions to our customers.

Health Care Reform in the United States

Lilly supports access to affordable, private health care coverage for all Americans.

• With a diverse population of more than 300 million people, all with individual needs, there is no single solution for health care reform in the United States.


• Effective health care policy is contingent on a balance between access, quality, and cost.


• Lilly supports health care reform packages that extend health care access to those who currently lack it while preserving and/or improving access for those who have it today. For example, improving outreach to enroll individuals in the public programs for which they are already eligible.


• Lilly prefers free-market solutions over government-managed systems. Giving Americans the same tax benefits whether they purchase health care coverage individually or through their employer, enacting medical liability reforms, and expanding Health Care Savings accounts (HSAs) and other consumer-directed coverage models, would encourage participation in the health care system.


• Lilly supports patient-centered practices that enable individuals, along with their physicians and health care providers, to make informed choices regarding their health care. Health insurance benefit designs should foster the physician-patient relationship, and recognize the essential role of prescription medicines and other innovations in providing cost-effective health care.


• Lilly does not support single-payer systems. These government systems have been given numerous chances to work in other nations, and evidence suggests they are far from ideal. Single-payer systems restrict access, ration care, eliminate competition, and hinder quality improvements by limiting innovation.


• The government’s role should be primarily one of financial and administrative support for the health care infrastructure, e.g., subsidizing and facilitating setting standards for the rapid implementation of medical information technology, quality standard setting, and supporting a safety net.

Lilly Principles for U.S. Health Care Reform

• Principle 1: Lilly supports reforms that protect and encourage patient choice in the management of their health and the health of their families.


• Principle 2: Lilly supports health care reforms that enable patients as responsible participants in their health, while requiring accountability to patients by all participants in the health care arena – including insurers, health care providers (HCPs), payers, regulators, and innovators.


• Principle 3: Lilly supports health care reforms that protect and promote free-market competition by rewarding providers and innovators based on quality and value provided to the patient.


• Principle 4: Lilly supports reforms to U.S. health care that improve the quality and efficiency of health care delivery, thus reducing waste and system costs.

View the related speech "The Critical Condition: The Ills of America's Health Care System, and How We Can Heal Them" by Sidney Taurel, Chairman and CEO of Eli Lilly and Company..

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Intellectual Property Protection

Lilly 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 the product. Without this protection, pharmaceutical research companies would not be able to recoup the approximately $800 million that they invest, on average, to discover and develop each new drug. Lack of strong intellectual property rights would have a chilling effect on the industry's ability to bring new lifesaving drugs to patients around the world.

Lilly recognizes the importance of international efforts that seek to improve and harmonize intellectual property protection throughout the world. We continue to support international trade agreements that facilitate the implementation of effective patent protection for pharmaceutical products in important markets that formerly provided inadequate protection. Lilly also recognizes the significant contributions that U.S. trade laws and the World Trade Organization (WTO) rules have made in the area of intellectual property protection. We support their continued use to encourage developing countries to provide effective patent protection for pharmaceutical products. Adherence to WTO standards of intellectual property protection stimulates economic growth (through increased investment and retention of local talent) and ensures the availability of innovative medicines.

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Value of Pharmaceuticals

Lilly advocates 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.

With the U.S., for example, devoting approximately 15 percent of its economy to health care (as measured by gross domestic product), there is increasing pressure to contain growth in these costs. Innovative and cost-effective pharmaceuticals are an important way to help contain overall health care costs. As a result, society benefits as health care solutions become more cost-effective and people live longer, healthier and more active lives.

At Lilly, we believe that relying on the judgment of health care decision-makers who provide and pay for health care is the way to fully realize the value of pharmaceuticals. Excessive or inappropriate government regulations, including cost controls, stifle the innovation necessary to bring the next generation of lifesaving drugs to customers. Applying market principles to the health care system can ensure the delivery of high-quality, lower-cost health care by encouraging innovation and efficiency, which ultimately benefit patients.

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Technology as a Driver of Drug Discovery

Lilly is a leader in researching and developing superior pharmaceutical-based health care solutions that enable patients to live longer, healthier and more active lives. This continued excellence hinges on our ability to use and apply promising technological advances, such as genomics, combinatorial chemistry, molecular biology and informatics. New technologies hold the key for our researchers to gain a better understanding of complex disease processes and to develop new therapeutic approaches aimed at preventing, treating and curing diseases.

Lilly intends to make full use of all promising technological advances. Lilly will also continue to explore strategic partnerships with academic research institutions and biotechnology firms to make possible our application of new technologies in the drug discovery process. Corporate initiatives designed to improve the quality, speed and value of drug discovery and development will help Lilly satisfy increasing public demands for access to the fruits of technological advances while easing the enormous cost burden of moving an innovative compound from the laboratory to the market. Most important, such initiatives will help us address the critical unmet medical needs of patients.

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Integrated Approach to Health Care

In keeping with our commitment to provide customers with effective results and lower costs, Lilly encourages the transition from the current component-based health care system to a comprehensive integrated health care delivery system. The traditional approach of trying to control costs of each treatment element ignores the fact that limitations on one element may lead to increased patient morbidity and/or mortality, with a resulting increase in total health care costs.

For example, while a new drug may cost more than an older one, the benefits of the new therapy may far outweigh this increased expense by eliminating other expenses, such as hospitalization. We believe that the best approach to treatment is to consider the whole patient and to use whatever combination of interventions and therapies is most likely to produce optimal clinical and economic results. No element of the health care delivery process can work alone.

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Access and Cost-Containment Measures

Lilly produces medicines to meet patients' health care needs, and we believe that it is critical for patients to have access to our products, which save and improve lives. Access to medicines is a function not only of price but of health care coverage, particularly in the United States. For this reason, Lilly strongly supports adding drug coverage to the U.S. Medicare program as well as finding ways to increase the availability of affordable health insurance for all. In other countries, additional factors, such as government interventions that limit or delay the availability of new products, price controls and a health infrastructure that ensures proper use, play a major role in determining whether new breakthrough medications will be available.

Lilly recognizes the importance of containing rising health care costs triggered by aging populations, increased public expectations of the health care industry, and in some countries, the need to meet budgetary restrictions and/or reduce budget deficits. We believe that innovative pharmaceuticals are part of the solution to - not the cause of - this problem. Governmental efforts to reduce drug access and prescribing are not effective and ultimately hurt patients. Simply put, they shift costs to other components of the health care system. Pharmaceuticals, when properly integrated with other methods of treatment, lead to lower overall health care costs.

The research-based pharmaceutical industry is uniquely qualified to discover, develop and make lifesaving innovative medicines available to patients who need them. Measures to artificially control industry growth and drug prices are counterproductive to that effort. Government-mandated restrictions reduce the return on investment needed by pharmaceutical firms to engage in the costly research and development of new cost-effective products. The competitive market forces that exist in the pharmaceutical industry are the best insurance against excessive drug prices and a key driver of continued discovery and development of innovative drugs that help patients. We believe that integrated, private-sector coverage for drugs is the best way to ensure access by all patients to the miracles of modern medicines.

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