INTERNATIONAL POLICY ANALYSIS Getting the Incentives Right: The Health Impact Fund A Concrete Contribution to Global Justice and an Innovation in Global Health THOMAS POGGE July 2011 n The human right to health, enshrined in Article 25 of the Universal Declaration of Human Rights, is fundamental because health is an important precondition for the realization of most other human rights. n Shortfalls in the realization of this human right are highly correlated with poverty: most of today's morbidity and premature mortality are poverty-related. Most poverty is undeserved: at least 80 % of global income variability is explained by a person's initial country and class which profoundly affect human beings from the moment of conception. n Avoidable health deficits result in avoidable suffering, lack of physical and mental functioning, as well as premature death on a massive scale. Because most of these medical conditions cause economic losses that are much larger than what it would have cost to avoid or adequately treat these conditions, realizing the human right to health would actually increase human economic prosperity overall. n This point is especially obvious in regard to the current international system for en­couraging pharmaceutical innovation, whose incentives are only tenuously related to health outcomes. This system is unsustainable as even the wealthiest countries cannot afford skyrocketing health care costs forever. There are huge collective gains waiting to be realized through reform of how we reward the development of new medicines. n The Health Impact Fund(HIF) is a concrete proposal for how, in the important do­main of pharmaceutical innovation, medical costs can be meaningfully tied to thera­peutic benefits.