Cheaper med law useless

THIS writer, confined in a hospital for one week already, hopes to be discharged today. One thing I have found out is that medicine prices have risen by leaps and bounds despite the Cheaper Medicines Act of 2008.

The law (RA 9502) passed during the incumbency of Pres. Gloria Macapagal-Arroyo should have already brought down prices of a thousand essential medicines within the reach of the poor. Alas, not much has been done about it.

At that time I wrote that only around a hundred “maintenance” drugs had been slash-priced by 50 percent at most.

It’s the Big Pharma – collective term for manufacturers of branded medicines – that still calls the shots. 

Can we blame the people for now doubting whether the law would still deliver its promise?

What’s wrong with that law is that it has allowed transnational corporations (TNCs) to retain control of 70 percent of the marketing, distribution and pricing of medicines.

The TNCs dictate the pricing of essential medicines. They enjoy the exclusive license to produce certain drugs.

There is therefore a need not just to implement  the existing law but to amend it  by creating a regulatory board that would peg drug prices based on production cost and reasonable profit.

Also, granting of tax holidays to local drug manufacturers would stimulate competition and minimize parallel importation.

Our experience with the Generics Law likewise points an accusing finger at the multinationals that suppress the growth of generic equivalents of branded, expensive drugs. They have somehow succeeded in peddling the false propaganda that cheap generics are impure and therefore ineffective. To this day, generic drugs account for more or less ten percent of medicines being sold in the Philippines.

No less than the author of the original bill, former congressman Ferjenel Biron, recognized the law’s flaw, prompting him to sponsor an amendment seeking to impose direct price regulation based on production cost through a price regulatory board under the Department of Health (DOH). The amendment failed to pass – no thanks to pressure from the lobbying Big Pharma.

That regulatory board could have already served its purpose had Biron’s original draft of the Cheaper Med Law not been discarded in favor of the Senate version of the bill filed by then senator Mar Roxas which would empower the President – upon recommendation by the Department of Health – to regulate medicine prices.

Succeeding President Benigno Simeon Aquino never used that power. And we have not heard of present President Duterte exercising it, either.

No wonder the Filipino people’s access to essential medicines is at the mercy of profit-greedy transnational drug corporations.

The failed Biron amendment would have re-introduced the creation of the Drug Price Regulatory Board to be chaired by a representative from the DOH and co-chaired by a representative from the Department of Trade and Industry (DTI), with representatives from the academe, consumer groups, health professionals and economic organizations.

It would also compel the drug manufacturers to disclose information with respect to costing. Only then would the government set the maximum retail price.

The Big Pharma controls 80 percent of medicine supplies; they enjoy 30 percent discriminatory volume discount that is not passed on to customers.

Price regulation would level the playing field, as it has done in China, India, Bangladesh, and Pakistan.

There was a time when the Council for Health and Development (CHD), a national organization of community-based health programs, bewailed the unabated monopoly trade among big players in the drug industry that tends to further banish local manufacturers into oblivion. The grievance fell on deaf ears. (hvego31@gmail.com/PN)

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