Li calls for affordable medicines for cancer
Premier Li Keqiang again urged more efforts to improve patients’ access to costly cancer treatments after a hit movie drew people's attention to the dilemma faced by patients.
“The fact that patients with cancer and other serious diseases can’t afford, have no access to or cannot wait to buy imported ‘lifesaving drugs’ highlights the urgency of reducing drug prices and ensuring supply,” Li said in a written instruction in response to heated public discussion following the screening of Dying to Survive.
Government departments must hurry to carry out related measures decided by the State Council, China’s Cabinet, speeding up the process if possible, he said.
The movie, based on real events, reflects struggles of leukemia patients to obtain more affordable drugs to treat the disease. They had to resort to different, generic drugs from India because the brand drugs imported were too expensive for them. It has been regarded as one of the most popular movies in China this year, with a score of 8.9 out of 10 on Douban, a website that rates movies based on netizen votes.
During two State Council executive meetings in April and June, measures to reduce the prices of cancer drugs were released.
They included eliminating import tariffs for such drugs, reducing taxes on production of cancer drugs and placing more imported patent drugs, in particular cancer drugs, on the reimbursement list for basic medical insurance programs.
“Cancer has become a top killer of the people, and we must try our best to save patients and ease their financial burden,” Li said. “We need to speed up our efforts, as time means life for cancer patients.”
In May, import tariffs were lifted on 103 of the 138 antineoplastic drugs — which inhibit the maturation and proliferation of malignant cells — available on the Chinese market, and the value added tax levied on them was also reduced significantly.
Authorities will also adopt measures to help lower costs such as price negotiations with manufacturers and greater use of centralized government procurement, according to the National Health Commission.
In an interview with China Daily on Wednesday, Tedros Adhanom Ghebreyesus, director-general of the World Health Organization, said the WHO would work with China on the production of new, high-quality innovative and generic drugs.
“China is making progress in producing both innovative and generic drugs,” he said. “We would like to encourage China to continue the progress.”
The cooperation will focus on addressing China’s internal problems and benefiting Chinese patients, but it will also benefit patients in other countries, Ghebreyesus said.
“We will work with China to improve the quality of drugs by introducing stringent regulations,” he said. “This is what we have agreed on and we hope to bring some progress.”
Chronic diseases such as cancer and cardiovascular diseases have become a more prominent health problem in China in recent years, accounting for 80 percent of the deaths in China every year, while the global average is around 70 percent, he said.
China has taken measures in recent years, including price negotiations with pharmaceutical manufacturers, to lower prices for imported cancer drugs.
Amid heated discussion about the film, Dying to Survive, Premier Li Keqiang has instructed relevant departments to lower the retail price of some imported lifesaving anti-cancer medicines as soon as possible, and ensure the regular supply of the medicines. China has 4.29 million new cancer patients and 2.81 million people die of cancer each year. Some cancer patients exhaust their savings and even go into debt to buy expensive imported drugs that domestic pharmaceutical companies do not yet have the ability to produce.
Although the central government scrapped the tariffs on some anti-cancer drugs and some other imported medicines that Chinese patients rely on to treat severe diseases from May 1, to the disappointment of patients, as well as Premier Li, the retail prices of most of the medicines have remained unchanged till now.
It means some middlemen, if not institutions, are gaining the benefits of the zero tariff reform rather than patients and their families. That is why the premier has again instructed the distance from the customs to the patients be shortened. However, to make that happen, the government should first overhaul the whole distribution system and retail mechanism for medicines.
As the experiences of many other countries show, the Chinese government must strengthen its bargaining and negotiating position with foreign pharmaceutical companies, which are concerned about profits, not patients.
The Chinese pharmaceutical enterprises, particularly the Staterun ones, should concentrate all their research and development on making breakthroughs in anti-cancer treatments, and try their best to produce them at an early date.
And the government should also consider listing these lifesaving medicines in the medical care insurance to subsidize patients, which some better-off local governments have already done.
On average, eight people are diagnosed with cancer every minute in China, and six of them will die of their disease. The relevant departments must waste no time in carrying out Li’s instructions.
— THEPAPER.CN