Inflation: How can it affect supply of medicines? Part II

Conversations on the EU Pharma

Medicines for Europe

Health & Fitness, Medicine

0 • 0 Ratings

🗓️ 22 March 2023

⏱️ 25 minutes

🔗️ Recording | iTunes | RSS

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Summary

Multiple factors, such as a growing and ageing population, the introduction and increased cost of new innovative medicines and the greater chronic disease burden, have put pressure on healthcare budgets across Europe. Therefore, almost all European countries apply strict price regulations to off-patent medicines, with the primary goal of minimising healthcare expenditure. Strict rules for generic medicines to persistently decrease prices irrespective of market conditions have been the prime driver of European market and industrial consolidation. This has been exacerbated by the COVID-19 crisis and the war in Ukraine, which have dramatically increased general inflation, as well as the cost of goods. Consequently, the security of the medicine supply for patients is at risk.

This shows the need for a shift in pricing policies to ensure healthy market competition and prevent the undesired effects of existing pricing mechanisms, allowing patients to continue to have access to a broad range of therapeutic options as well as guaranteeing that generic competition remains healthy in the long term.

In this part of the episode, we will explore new pricing policy models that may provide an adequate response to delivering a sustainable supply of medicines to patients considering the current circumstances (COVID-19 recovery, inflation, increasing cost of goods).

Episode host:

· Adrian van den Hoven - Director General, Medicines for Europe

Expert speakers:

· Victor Mendonca - Chair of the Generic Market Access Committee, Medicines for Europe and Head of Corporate Affairs Europe, Viatris

· Clement François - Partner, Putnam PHMR

Transcript

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0:00.0	Hello and welcome to conversations on EU pharma.
0:14.1	I'm Adrian Vanernhoven, the Director General of Medicines for Europe, and I'm happy to participate in episode four of our podcast series. This one's devoted a second
0:24.6	time to the topic of inflation and how this can affect the supply of your medicines. So there are a lot of
0:32.3	factors affecting the demand for medicines today, such as a growing and aging population, but there are also
0:39.9	a lot of cost factors, such as the increased cost of new innovative medicines, and the chronic
0:46.0	disease burden, which hospitals and health care systems need to take care of. And all of this is
0:51.6	putting a lot of pressure on health care budgets across Europe.
0:55.9	Therefore, almost every single European country applies a very strict price regulation when it comes
1:02.9	to off-patent medicines, generic or biosimilar medicines. And the primary goal of these strict
1:08.8	policies is to minimize health expenditure.
1:12.5	Now, these strict pricing rules for generic medicines persistently decrease the price of medicines in the market over time
1:20.5	and have been the real driver of market and industrial consolidation when it comes to the supply of medicines.
1:29.2	Unfortunately, this situation has also been exacerbated by the COVID-19 crisis and the war in Ukraine, which have dramatically
1:35.5	increased general inflation and inflation for manufacturers of medicines in particular.
1:42.1	Consequently, the security of medicines supply for patients is at risk.
1:47.5	This shows that there's really a need for policy reforms to make sure that we put the
1:52.5	security of medicine supply first. And to do this, we really need healthy competition with a lot
1:58.9	of suppliers in the generic medicines market.
2:02.2	Consequently, we need to discuss how to introduce reforms to generic pricing policies
2:07.3	that are sustainable for health care systems so they can afford the medicines for the patients,
2:12.0	of course. And secondly, so that they can incentivize the industry to invest into manufacturing and resilient
2:18.5	supply chains. So to discuss this today, we have two experts. Victor Mendoza is the chair of the
	...

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