High medicines prices, low affordability and poor availability are key impediments to access to treatment in many low- and middle-income countries (1–9). Certainly, in those countries where the majority of the population still buys its medicines through out-of-pocket payments, the high cost of medicines (relative to the household budget) means that an illness in the family exposes that family to the risk of catastrophic expenditure. Too often the choice is made to go without. Inequity in medicines access is widely perceived as symptomatic of weaknesses in the health-care system and represents a failure on the part of national governments to fulfil their obligations towards.
