House urges govt to regulate drug prices
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.