354 more essential medicines to be added to drug price control

By Staff
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Google Oneindia News

New Delhi, May 15 (UNI) To keep the prices of drugs under check, the government today proposed to add another 354 essential drugs to the list of existing 74 drugs under the price control regime covering 32 per cent of the Rs 50,000 crore pharmaceutical industry of the country.

Inaugurating the third meeting of Pharma Advisory Forum, Chemicals and Fertilizers Minister Ram Vilas Paswan said the Working Group on Health Insurance and Drug Banks will come out with its final recommendations within two months and will present its report in the next meeting of the Forum.

On the issue of trade margins, the Minister said the Pharma Industry Associations had voluntarily agreed to reduce trade margins in the case of generic drugs and 11 pharma companies had reduced the prices of 886 such medicines. The revised prices of these 886 packs were to be implemented by the companies on packs manufactured after October 2/November 2, 2006.

However, he mentioned that according to a survey out of 886 medicine packs, 296 medicine packs (of 9 companies) with reduced prices are available in the markets of Delhi. The companies have informed after depletion of old stocks with distributors, these medicines will be available with reduced rates in the market.

Mr Paswan also said the government is considering to raise funding on health care to at least 2-3 per cent of GDP from the initial level of 0.9 per cent of GDP and will also step up public investment in programmes to control communication diseases and provide leadership to the National AIDS control effort.

He said special schemes have been proposed to make drugs accessible to families below poverty line (BPL). These schemes would have to be implemented jointly by various stakeholders including the central government, state governments and the industry.

The Minister mentioned apart from controlling prices, Government would also like to ensure that the essential medicines become affordable and access to such medicines be increased.

Mr Paswan further said the government has formulated the Draft National Pharmaceutical Policy, 2006 which aims at keeping prices of essential medicines under check and ensuring availability of these medicines at reasonable prices to common man.

Draft National Pharmaceutical Policy, 2006 is presently being discussed by a Group of Ministers constituted by the Union Cabinet.

A National Health Insurance Scheme has been proposed in the draft Policy to cover all BPL families and also setting up of District Illness Assistance Fund to cover serious illness of poor families.

He said the annual limit of 20 per cent price increase has been reduced to 10 per cent price increase per annum.

Mr Paswan informed he would recommend to the government to earmark 20 per cent share of the MPs and MLAs Local Area Development (LAD) fund for the health sector and to send the amount directly to the hospital of the beneficiary for treatment of serious diseases. This would reduce burden on the centre and the states.

UNI

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