A week after the National Pharmaceutical Pricing Authority (NPPA), revised prices for 56 more lifesaving medicines, Bhupendra Singh, Chairman of the regulatory body said the biggest challenge in the ‘access to medicine’ debate in India was to get the consumer to be aware of his/her .
“Doctors have an important role to play in making drugs affordable to the patients. But the real challenge is in getting every one to prescribe generic drugs. We have made a request to the health ministry that central government hospitals prescribe only generic drugs from now on. This is a start. Our hope is that soon, people will start asking doctors if there are generic options when doctors give branded medicines,” Mr Singh said.
Phased revision The price revision is a part of the Drug price Control Order (DPCO) of 2013, which expanded India’s National List of Essential Medicines (NLEM) from 74 to 799 formulations. Despite facing pressure from domestic generic drug manufacturers, NPPA has been working on revising and lowering prices of NLEM in a phased manner, he said. “The objective of the government is to make the drugs on the NLEM as affordable as possible. In India, we do not have a system where the government insures or provides health care for everyone, like they do in United States. Till the time we evolve a system like that, we will have to cap prices on medicines. Pharmaceutical industry does not like any regulation but, in India, they have learnt to live with it. The truth is we control only a fraction of the market. There is a perception — rightly so — that pharmaceutical companies operate on huge profit margins.”
The DPCO was put in place after the Sino-Indian war of 1962 because companies started to profiteer and it became necessary in public interest to cap drug prices.
NLEM updated “Over the years, it has been modified five times. The health ministry revises the NLEM list every three years, going by public health interests and the Department of Pharmaceuticals (DoP) enforces it through DPCO. On March 10, the DoP notified the first schedule of drugs that will come under price control. Even after all prices have been revised, we only cover 17 per cent of the pharmaceutical market. The rest 83 per cent is not in our control,” Mr Singh said.
So far, NPPA has revised prices of 330 out of 799 formulations. The DoP is currently not looking at further expanding the NLEM, he said. “There are a few more medicines that need to be brought under price control but we won’t be expanding the list for now. The most expensive are cancer drugs and there is a need for price control on that front.”
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