Cost of medicines - Still waiting for a deal on drug costs

As anyone struggling to maintain private health insurance will know, medical inflation outstrips general inflation by spectacular multiples.

As anyone dependent on State services to provide their health needs knows, a new reality exists and expectations and service levels have been modified — and, despite reforms, not always for the better. Because the HSE pays for drugs for more than two million people the cost of medicines has a profound bearing on what can be achieved with reduced health budgets and what the State needs to set aside to sustain these schemes.

This loaves-and-fishes challenge is exacerbated by the fact that the HSE was, in some cases, paying up to 24 times more than Britain’s National Health Service (NHS) for generic medicines. This situation, as was seen recently, is made even more challenging when new and very expensive drugs become available for specific conditions — cystic fibrosis in the latest instance — as there is an expectation that the State will provide them irrespective of cost or equally pressing demands on a stretched health budget.