Spain to cut 2.4 billion euros from drugs bill with new generics rules
pharmafile | August 24, 2011 | News story | Sales and Marketing | Spain, generic prescribing, generics
The Spanish government has passed new laws to increase generic prescribing and cut billions of euros from the country’s drugs bill.
Doctors will have to write prescriptions using a drug’s generic name and pharmacists will be obliged to fill that scrip using the cheapest available generic drug.
The move will not affect newer branded drugs, whose patents prevent cheaper generic versions coming to market, but it will impinge upon companies with older patented medicines that have lost this protection and face generic competition.
The rule change will be most concerning to small-to-medium sized firms (SMEs) that rely on single blockbusters for the majority of their revenue.
It will also have a negative impact on the bigger companies that market branded statins and blood thinners, two groups of medicines that tend to succumb to generic substitution in times of austerity.
The Spanish government hopes its new measures will save 2.4 billion euros (£2.09 billion) a year – adding to the austerity measures undertaken in 2010, which reduced the spend on drugs by 2.4 per cent.
The law also states that patients should only be told the chemical name of the drug being prescribed, regardless of whether it is a patented medicine or a generic, meaning patients will now not know what type of drug their doctor intended to prescribe.
Speaking to the Guardian newspaper the Basque nationalist deputy Josu Erkoreka, whose party backed the move, said: “It means an important saving for the public accounts and will, without doubt, benefit most people who use public health services.
“The interests of the big drugs companies must give way to public interest, and what matters is reducing the deficit and lowering the drugs bill for millions of people who use public health services.”
The health system in Spain is funded partly by the state and by private contributions from patients.
The greater use of generics will help offset Spain’s spiraling debt problem as the government tries to bring its budget deficit down from the high of 11.1% in 2009, to 6% by the end of this year.
Ben Adams
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