China cuts cancer drug prices
Film triggers discussion over dilemma of patients
China’s medical insurance administration has reportedly taken measures to reduce prices of a majority of the most frequently used and clinically effective cancer drugs, including cutting their prices via public bidding.
To reduce the price of cancer drugs, China has included 15 more clinically effective yet expensive cancer medicines into its list of approved medical insurance reimbursement drugs and the state medical insurance administration will cut the price of cancer drugs on the list via public bidding and procurement, China Central Television (CCTV) reported on Sunday.
Negotiations will be launched among pharmaceutical enterprises aiming to include anti-cancer drugs beyond those on the medical insurance reimbursement list. Negotiations aim to balance patients’ demand and adequete profits for pharmaceutical enterprises.
Cheap anti-cancer drugs are in urgent demand since those drugs are mainly imported and most are not covered by the country’s health insurance, experts noted.
China’s high-cost anti-cancer drugs and relatively cheap Indian generic drug imports were widely discussed after the film Dying to Survive made a splash in China.
The film is based on the true story of Lu Yong, a leukemia patient, who imports and sells less expensive generic anticancer drugs from India for chronic myeloid leukemia (CML) patients on the Chinese mainland.
Overseas pharmaceutical enterprises need to report their selling prices in different countries and regions to the Chinese government to help prevent inflated prices in the Chinese market, a researcher specializing in healthcare reform from the Chinese Hospital Association told the Global Times on the condition of anonymity.
Once lifesaving drugs are produced by pharmaceutical enterprises and approved by the China Food and Drug Administration, they should be included into the national healthcare catalogue in a timely fashion, the researcher said.
China should also encourage domestic generic drug development when the patent protection period of imported drugs ends, which would make cancer drugs affordable to everyone who is in need, experts said.
However, Zhu Hengpeng, a public policy expert at the Chinese Academy of Social Sciences, warned that reducing the price of anti-cancer drugs would benefit patients but in the long run, it may challenge domestic medical research and development.
China’s domestic pharmaceutical industry needs reasonable profit margin to compete with imported drug companies, Zhu said.
And moreover, the key to reducing high drug prices should be making the drug market independent from public hospitals since some public hospitals, which own monopoly rights for the pricing of some drugs, want to earn more from selling them, Zhu said.
Zhu explained that if some drugs’ prices were reduced, public hospitals would soon adjust their drug purchasing structure, replacing lowerpriced drugs with higher-priced ones.