Singapore, May 15, 2009: In remarks before the US Chamber of Commerce, Dr John C. Lechleiter, chairman and CEO of Eli Lilly and Company said that federal policymakers' attention to access, quality and costs in health reform should also include a focus on innovation - or the results could include "unintended side-effects." Dr Lechleiter spoke as part of the Chamber of Commerce's National Chamber Foundation CEO Leadership Series.

Innovation, he said, helped boost the average American's life expectancy from 47 to 78 years, a rise of 66 percent over the past century and "unprecedented in human history." In his keynote speech before a group of business, government and health care representatives, Dr Lechleiter identified specific policy proposals and their implications for patients and for developing breakthrough treatments and cures.

"Encouraging innovation needs to be the purpose of US health care reform, not its victim," Lechleiter said. "It's innovation that explains why we are the healthiest, longest-lived and wealthiest human beings ever to occupy the planet."

But, he asserted, if heath care reform does not encourage innovation, "then the important goals of expanding access, improving quality and controlling costs will prove illusory."

He cited a Columbia University study that analyzed data from 52 countries and showed that, controlling for other factors, the availability of new medicines alone accounted for 40 percent of the increase in life expectancy during the 1980s and 1990s. He said the medical advances of the past century that made life-expectancy and quality-of-life gains possible included the invention of Antibiotics to cure infections, Vaccines that have nearly eradicated several conditions, such as polio, Effective treatments for a growing number of cancers, and Medications that have lessened the toll of a number of dreaded diseases, such that they are now considered chronic, manageable conditions.

He then observed, "The economic payback from these gains is difficult to overstate. The payback is years of productive work, economic value added, consumer spending and tax dollars paid - which together outweighs the costs of treatment overwhelmingly - even if you resist the idea of putting a number on the intrinsic value of being alive."

Dr Lechleiter rounded out his speech with a closer look at several areas of public policy under which, depending on the path taken in health reform, innovation will be enhanced or curbed.

Prefacing his policy prescriptions, he said, "When it comes to sustaining innovation, the burden remains on us -- as it should. We're not asking for a handout or a bailout. Instead, businesses that live or die by health care innovation in the US ask only that we be allowed to continue doing just that: proving the value of what we've developed or failing in the marketplace."