Twenty million euros of additional financing, repayment redistributions and addition of closed budget balances were promised by minister of health, Adonis Georgiadisin the meeting he had with the pharmaceutical productsfollowing their reactions to exorbitant amounts of mandatory hospital reimbursements medication over €30, which in the first half of 2023 reached 82.9%. With the additions, a reduction is estimated to 75% and in 2024 to 69%.
According to the Association of Pharmaceutical Companies of Greece (SFEE), if serious changes are not made, the pharmaceutical industry will not be sustainable.
According to the Association, it is an unfavorable situation that in October 2024 there will be substantial difficulty in adjusting last year’s State expenses. This, he says, was evident in the meeting with the minister, where additional funding of just 20 million euros was announced, combined with internal redistributions from Clawback and the addition of closed budget balances to spending.
“Let no one expect that the pharmaceutical sector can be sustainable with reimbursements of 75% instead of 82.9%”, points out SFEE, adding: “We appreciate the efforts of the Ministry of Health to restore the problem in hospitals. It is the first channel where it has reached a point of extreme unsustainability and we maintain our commitments that reimbursements for hospital medicines for 2024 will be lower than those for 2022, which were also extremely high (69%) and should be significantly reduced in the coming years”.
SFEE has also made it clear that while they as an industry appreciate efforts to reduce waste and increase the return on investment in medicines, the main problem that remains is the underfunding of the industry, which is a result of the memos, which have been in the past since 2018.
Since then, only 1 in 5 new medicines arrives in Greece, keeping our country, by a significant margin, the title of European champion in returns to the pharmaceutical industry. This situation calls into question patients’ access to existing treatments and also to new innovative treatments, recognizing that medicines represent only 15% of all healthcare expenditure across Europe, which makes it necessary to redefine priorities on the part of the State.
The market for innovative medicines is collapsing
For its part, the PhARMA Greece Innovation Forum (PIF) highlights that the market for innovative medicines is collapsing, as recovery developments are now unpredictable.
“When the State admits that it covers innovative hospital treatments for less than 2 in 10 patients with serious chronic illnesses, this issue not only should not be closed, but it should be the starting point for drastic interventions at least at this last moment.
We hope that the government will recognize in practice that the 83% mandatory reimbursements to hospitals – combined with the continued increase in recovery in the innovative medicines pipeline in EOPYY – is a dangerous admission of the failure of the recovery memorandum measure.
The pharmaceutical policy built since 2012 on the fragile foundations of recovery is collapsing in a deafening way and endangers – today, not in the future – patients’ access to available and new and innovative treatments” notes the PIF in its announcement, calling on the Ministry of Health to immediately open an honest discussion about a sustainable pharmaceutical policy – as a social and health need.
According to the PIF, a package of structural and price policies is necessary that reduces – without protectionism – total expenditure on medicines and, on the other hand, strengthens the public budget and allows the substitution cycle to function as in any medicine system. modern healthcare.