2023-09-21 15:35:56
Put on the grill following a revelation quantifying the amount of contracts concluded with pharmaceutical firms for innovative drugs, Vandenbroucke promises to act.
Frank Vandenbroucke intends to limit the duration of contracts with the pharmaceutical sector to three years. This is what he announced to deputies in the plenary session of the federal parliament this Thursday afternoon. This announcement follows revelations from the IPM group mediaaccording to which the amount of contracts negotiated directly between the Minister of Health and pharmaceutical companies increased, between 2011 and 2023, from 8.7 million euros to 3.2 billion.
This increase is explained by the duration of the contracts, explains Frank Vandenbroucke. These contracts do have an expiry date, but can be renewed, which means that their number increases year after year: 17 in 2011 against 98 in 2021 (latest official figures), revealed the IPM survey.
“I will make the proposal to reduce these contracts to a duration of three years, renewable only once“, declared the minister, also promising to improve the transparency of these contracts described as secret, in particular by Solidaris. The Socialist Mutuality had already sounded the alarm last January, calculating that social security could save 1 billion euros by applying fairer prices for medicines. Frank Vandenbroucke also intends to make competition more effective, as he had already announced in March. In this regard, Inami has developed a “road map” proposing 52 actions to modernize the reimbursement of medicines.
To understand the origin of the contracts signed between the Minister of Health and the pharmaceutical sector, we must first see how does the drug reimbursement mechanism work?. In order to avoid patients having to pay the full price of the medicines produced, the Medicines Reimbursement Commission – which receives the files sent by pharmaceutical companies – examines the requests and sends an opinion to the responsible minister. The latter decides, alone, on the reimbursement agreement for the medicine.
That is the general principle. But in the case of innovative medicines, prices are the subject of direct negotiation between the minister and the pharmaceutical firm, without the Medicines Commission having a say.. This procedure makes it possible to accelerate the marketing of drugs that are often crucial for health (we are talking about drugs used in the fight against cancer, or intended for rare diseases, for example). Their effectiveness is not called into question, but the prices charged are, believe the mutual societies, overvalued.
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