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[av_heading heading=’EDITORIAL | Medicine security’ tag=’h3′ style=’blockquote modern-quote’ size=” subheading_active=’subheading_below’ subheading_size=’15’ padding=’10’ color=” custom_font=”][/av_heading]
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Saturday, March 25, 2017
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WITH SO many controversies in the news nowadays, perhaps many have already forgotten that just three months ago – December 2016 to be exact – President Duterte announced a good news: he planned to use the P5 billion he received from the Philippine Amusement and Gaming Corp. for his social fund to revive the Botika ng Bayan or nationwide community pharmacies started by the Arroyo administration in 2005. In 2011, the Aquino government issued a moratorium on the project due to problems with financing and restocking of medicines. The Botika ng Bayan aimed to provide the community with medicines most needed in the area. Now, the Duterte administration wanted the Botika ng Bayan outlets to give free medicines to the poor.
Good news, indeed. But we can’t help but ask what happened to the Cheaper Medicines Law? This law provides Filipinos with a window of opportunity for medicines that are already well within their means. When our legislators crafted the law, they have in mind medicine security for all Filipinos. It is the very intent of Congress to use this law as a tool to bring down the cost of medicines. But several years since its approval, have the prices of medicines gone down? Not really.
Medicine security is like food security. Its efficacy is three-pronged: affordability, availability and reliability. These three packages should be felt and experienced by all Filipinos in a sustained and continuous mode. There should be no letup in seeing the promises of the law come to pass.
We should not to let the Cheaper Medicines Law follow in the footsteps of the Oil Deregulation Law and the Epira Law which both failed to deliver on their respective mandates. When these two laws were crafted, the promises were to bring the prices of petroleum and power down. But years later, we eat and breathe unabated oil and power rate hikes.
Let us not allow the Cheaper Medicines Law to go this way. It will be strike three for us if we let this happen.
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