House urges govt to regulate drug prices

Dewi Santoso, The Jakarta Post, Jakarta

House of Representatives legislators urged the government on Friday to issue a regulation to keep drug prices under control.

The deputy chairman of House Commission VII Surya Chandra said the government's failure to control drug prices had disrupted the distribution of medicine and created an unhealthy competition among pharmacies and drugstores.

"It's unfair. Manufacturers have given distributors discounts of up to 70 percent, and yet the sale prices are still far above affordable levels," said Surya.

The same medicines can also vary in price from pharmacy to pharmacy, he said.

The legislators want the proposed regulation to, among other things, require that drugs carry stamped price tags.

"Medicines are not commodities, they fulfill a social need and should not be commercialized," he said.

Another deputy chairman of Commission VII, Sanoesi Tambunan, suggested that the regulation spell out clear procedures on the pricing and distribution of drugs.

In response, the head of the Food and Drug Monitoring Agency, Sampoerno, said he would discuss the pricing of drugs with the Pharmaceutical Companies Association.

He said that in the absence of a regulation on drug pricing, the agency compared the prices of medicines sold in Indonesia by multinational companies with those same medicines sold abroad.

Eri, a pharmacist at Kimia Farma in Central Jakarta, said pharmacies received recommended selling prices for medicines.

"Distributors give pharmacies a recommended selling price for each medicine, but then it's up to the pharmacies to sell the medicines at either a lower or higher price," she said.

She said price labeling would be helpful in avoiding price wars, but warned that drugs sold in pharmacies were usually removed from their original packages.

"The medicines that we receive from distributors are usually in large packages. So if a patient needs only five capsules, we'd take five out of the original package," said Eri.

Ida Marlinda, a researcher at the Indonesian Consumers Foundation, said price labeling might not be the best solution.

"It might create confusion among patients who don't really understand the differences between, say, two patented medicines for fever. They will be confused about which one to buy because they don't know which one is better," said Ida.

She said it was best to have pharmacists tell customers which medicine was best for them and how much that medicine cost.