A 40 PER cent drop in the price of up to 300 commonly prescribed drugs, comes into effect today and is expected to save the State up to €94 million in a full year.
Following discussions with Minister for Health Mary Harney, the Irish Pharmaceutical Healthcare Association (IPHA) is to drop the price of long-established medicines, which are coming out of patent and are among the most commonly prescribed.
It has established a website checkthelist.ie for customers to see the drugs included in the reduction and the changed prices. A low-call number – 1890 876 700 – has also been set up.
The IPHA represents international research-based pharmaceutical companies which make up 90 per cent of manufacturers in Ireland.
The Association of Pharmaceutical Manufacturers in Ireland (APMI), representing the remaining pharmaceutical companies, was also in talks with Ms Harney but did not reach agreement on price cuts. The APMI companies manufacture generic drugs which are already out of patent and therefore cheaper.
Ms Harney expressed her disappointment that the APMI members had “declined to offer any reductions” and noted that the current agreement with these companies expires on September 1st.
She warned in a Dáil parliamentary reply: “It is my firm intention to obtain savings from APMI of at least an equivalent level to those secured from IPHA, which would result in savings of about €27 million in a full year.”
IHPA’s commercial director Brian Murphy said yesterday that the reduction would mean that the patented medicines would now be cheaper than those supplied by the APMI.
Asked why medicines were so expensive if they could be reduced by 40 per cent overnight, Mr Murphy said older products gradually went down in price. In 2006 they had agreed a 35 per cent cost reduction on certain medicines.
Mr Murphy said “older products have made back their development costs”, but new medicines would not be included because they had yet to make back those costs.
“Newer products are very much aligned” to international markets and it would be “very difficult” to get a reduction in those, he said.
