Cost of drugs - Stop looking abroad to set prices

THE National Consumer Agency has been complaining about the high cost of prescription medicine in this country. Ireland is the fourth most expensive country for prescription medicine in the eurozone.

Irish people are paying up to treble what people are paying for the same medicines in Spain.

One brand of anti-depressant drug that cost €87.74 in Ireland costs €26.73 — less than a third — for the same dose in Spain.

Hormone replacement drugs cost more than twice as much here as in Spain, while osteoporosis drugs are a third more expensive in this country.

People on medical cards get free prescriptions. The pharmacist gets paid the cost price and extra for dispensing the drug.

Pharmacists make more money on the drug refund scheme, but ultimately private patients are effectively subsidising the state schemes.

The National Consumer Agency wants the Government to look at the way in which prices are being set. The Department of Health sits down every five years with the pharmaceutical industry to fix the price of drugs. They look at the cost of various drugs in Britain and compare that price with the average price of those drugs in four other countries — Denmark, France, Germany and The Netherlands.

If the British price for any of the drugs is lower than the average of the others, they then plump for the British price.

But if the average prices is lower in the four continental countries, the Health Department and the industry plump for lowest price in those four countries.

In effect, they settle for the lowest of the highest, because those countries are all high-price economies. Prices here are, therefore, fixed in relation to other countries, not this country, where many of the drugs are actually manufactured.

Anne Fitzgerald, the new Chairman of the National Consumer Agency, is highly critical of the situation. It is an expensive method of setting prices that takes no cognisance of production or delivery costs.

This is not good enough, and she is quite right to insist that it should be changed, because it is grossly unfair to both the Irish consumer and taxpayer.

The pharmaceutical industry has been a significant player in the Celtic Tiger economy.

Six of the 10 leading pharmaceuticals are actually manufactured in this country, as are 12 of the leading 25 drugs. Thus Ireland is one of the leading drug manufactures, with the result that it is utterly absurd that drugs manufactured in this country can be sold for so much less in Spain and elsewhere.

Irish consumers are being ripped off.

The Department of Health is currently in negotiations about tackling drug prices in this country, but the department has been failing dismally in its efforts to come to grips with so many of its problems. Inflated drug prices are one of the more serious problems.

The department has recognised many of its problems but appears incapable of resolving them. Rather than meeting the nurses recently, the Minister for Health took off abroad, which is in a way symptomatic of our drug price problem.

The difficulties are of our own making, and the answers will be found here, not elsewhere.