[india-drug] Medicine Price Manual

[Sunitha Srinivas <s.srinivas@ru.ac.za>]

Medicine Price Manual
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In developing countries, most medicines are paid out-of-pocket by
individual patients rather than being subsidized through social
insurance. High prices are a major barrier to the use of medicines and
better health, yet too little is known about the prices that people pay
for medicines in low- and middle-income countries.

This manual and the accompanying Workbook and database provide a new
approach to measuring the prices of medicines. They result from the
widely-felt need for greater transparency on prices in the global
medicines marketplace. The work proposed can be carried out reliably
and at low cost by consumer groups, academic centres concerned with
public health, government departments or others.

The survey is focused on thirty key medicines covering the spectrum of
the global disease burden, particularly as it falls on low- and
middle-income countries. The results should raise questions about the
relative prices of innovator brand medicines and their generic
equivalents, about prices in different parts of the same country, about
the relationship between procurement prices and final prices to
patients, about the affordability of treatment for ordinary people and
about international differences in prices for the same medicines.

The methodology has been designed primarily for use in low- and
middle-income countries, but should be applicable to all countries. All
users are encouraged to submit the results to the WHO Essential Drugs
and Medicines Policy Department (WHO/EDM) and Health Action
International Europe so that they can be lodged on the database that is
specific to this initiative. This is accessible on HAI?s
website (www.haiweb.org/medicineprices). It is also available at
<http://www.who.int/medicines/library/prices.shtml>


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