2023-07-07 04:51:01
Do the laboratories have a right of life or death on French patients? In any case, this is what the Senate commission of inquiry on the drug shortage which unveils, this Thursday, July 6, a long report of nearly 400 pages. The document reveals that pharmaceutical companies are ready to withdraw no less than 700 specialties from the market, including medicinal products of major therapeutic interest (MITM) for patients. In question, prices, set by the Economic Committee for Health Products (CEPS), at amounts that are too low in France, compared to those of its European neighbors.
Among the hundred personalities heard during the hearings held at the Palais du Luxembourg, the Read, the lobby of pharmaceutical companies in France, has indeed “repeated”, according to the rapporteur Laurence Cohen, that the first solution to shortages is to increase drug prices. Not enough to convince the senator from Val-de-Marne: “This argument must be dismantled. If that was the only condition, it would be easy. Shortages are multifactorial“, she claims.
>> Our service – Save money by testing our Health Insurance comparator
Explosion of innovative drug prices
“The result of this price blackmail, encouraged by the financialization of laboratories, is an explosion of prices in favor of innovative treatments,” reads the report of the Senate inquiry committee. Because the price negotiation between the CEPS and the labs is “structurally unbalanced”. Dissatisfied with the prices offered, companies have several weapons at their disposal: discontinuation of marketing, delisting or denial early accessthis procedure which allows patients in a therapeutic impasse to benefit, on an exceptional and temporary basis, from unauthorized treatment and in a specific therapeutic indication.
READ ALSO Access to medicines: France’s dunce cap of Europe?
Heard by the Senate’s commission of inquiry, the Directorate General for Health (DNS) cited two recent cases of drugs for which manufacturers withdrew from the negotiating table with the CEPS: a last resort treatment for HIV (human immunodeficiency virus, responsible for AIDS) and a drug prescribed for young people aged 12 to 35 suffering from beta-thalassemia, a rare disease caused by a genetic anomaly of hemoglobin. In both cases, the operators renounced their entry into the French market because they considered that the price offered by the CEPS “did not guarantee them enough profitability,” says the Senate report.
Daily medications are not spared
“The drug, in our society, is considered a merchandise. And we say no. It is a universal good”, insists Laurence Cohen, rapporteur of the report of the Senate committee of inquiry on drug shortages. Especially since the marketing stoppages also concern mature drugs like Josacinewhose marketing authorization (AMM) dates back to 1983. Produced by the laboratory Astellas Pharma, this antibacterial antibiotic used in particular once morest atypical infantile pneumonia was the subject, in 2023, of a marketing stoppage “not linked to a problem of safety or effectiveness, but to an industrial decision of the laboratory”. Stocks thus ran out in just one month, despite the contingentement operated by the National Agency for the Safety of Medicines and Health Products (ANSM).
READ ALSO How are drug prices set in France?
A choice that is not unrelated to the evolution of the share of the Social Security budget dedicated to the reimbursement of drugs. Because in order for the French to benefit from innovative medicines, the government finances these treatments, at very expensive prices, by reductions in the price of everyday medicines such as paracetamol or phloroglucinol (known under the brand name Spasfon). Thus, “the high profitability of innovative products is built to the detriment of mature products, is it written in the Senate report. Their eviction is already a reality, and contributes greatly to drug shortages. Up to 70% of declarations of rupture concern medicinal products for which marketing authorization (MA) has been granted over ten years ago.”
In these specific cases, price increases might limit these stockouts. But if they are recorded, the Senate refuses that they benefit the laboratories without the slightest counterpart, in particular in terms of securing supplies.
Receive our latest news Every day, the selection of the main news of the day.
1688925304
#Labs #threaten #pull #drugs #market #inflate #prices
