Drug pricing policy: government urged to take members on-board in evolving process

Pharma Bureau, representative body of Research based Multinational Pharmaceutical Companies while warning the government about the possible drug crisis in near future has urged the government to take the industry representatives onboard in drug pricing policy evolving process.
Shahab Rizvi, Chairman and Arshad Saeed Khan, Co Chairman of Pharma Bureau while discussing a select group of journalists here on Monday urged the government, Federal Finance Minister Ishaq Dar and State Minister Saira Afzal Tarar to avert a potential drug crisis by constituting a committee to review the drug pricing policy draft. The Bureau's Executive Director Ayesha T Haq also spoke on the occasion.
"We have expressed our serious reservations on this draft to the government," they added. They mentioned that the proposed cut of 45 percent in drug prices (which have not been increased for last 13 years) will not only render their production unviable but will also result in influx of smuggled fake and spurious drugs.
They further said that drugs will be cheaper for the rich and more expensive for the poor and threat to the continuation of patient access programs under which thousands of poor critically ill patients are provided with the latest life-saving therapies for free. "We believe that if the government introduces a transparent market oriented pricing policy for the pharmaceutical industry, it would create the stability and predictability necessary to stimulate investment and growth in this important sector," Pharma Bureau co-chairman said.
The correct stimulus would also enable the Pharma industry to tap into the huge export potential for this sector, as witnessed by other countries in the region, and in order to achieve the industry needs a new policy with a transparent mechanism to adjust prices, benchmarked with other regional countries with similar incomes/standards of living, they added.
"Such policy would safeguard the interest of both investors and consumers because in the context of 600 plus local companies, an individual cost-plus based approach is not practical and could give rise to transparency and public/media concerns. A comparative benchmarking based pricing mechanism may also be more defensible in the public eye," they mentioned. Arshad was of the view that Pakistan's ability to evolve a predictable and transparent investment environment for the pharmaceutical sector will be in the long-term interest of the public and the country.