India ‘likely’ to increase price caps
pharmafile | June 25, 2014 | News story | Manufacturing and Production, Sales and Marketing | China, FDA, India, UK, pricing
India’s government is ‘likely’ to increase the number of drugs which are subject to price caps, according to a report from Reuters.
Last year India boosted the number of drugs whose price it controls from 74 to 348, the news agency says, and now people ‘directly involved in the process’ say that more are to be added.
India’s health ministry has formed a panel which is meeting this week to discuss the issue.
“It is surprising that yet another committee is being formed [on price control],” an executive at the Indian subsidiary of a global pharma company told Reuters. “This [is] quite the antithesis of what is the purported philosophy of the new government.”
Drugs pricing is a key issue in a country where few people have health insurance and many patients have little money to pay for treatments.
One of the ways the authorities have sought to get over this problem is by restricting patents, thus making the manufacture of cheaper generic drugs easier.
The Indian Supreme Court’s decision to deny a patent application for Novartis’ leukaemia medicine Glivec – and the granting of compulsory licences to other cancer drugs, including Bayer’s Nexavar, Roche’s Tarceva, and Pfizer’s Sutent – fall into this bracket.
India is not the only country which is determined to keep a lid on prices: the cost of medicines is also a major issue in China as some of have price tags which are 30-40% higher than those in western countries.
To help combat this, the National Development and Reform Commission is conducting an industry-wide inquiry into the pricing of medicines, and can impose hefty civil penalties on companies that violate China’s 2008 anti-monopoly law.
But Bruno Gensburger, chair of the European Union Chamber of Commerce in China’s pharma working group, suggested that the authorities may be trying to ‘frighten’ some pharma companies.
The European lobby group says China needs to tread carefully if it wants to get the benefits of free market economics, and believes the country’s government is ‘overly-dominant’ and should step back from the business environment.
Adam Hill
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