NEW DELHI: Around 40% of the essential medicines in India with lowest MRP are priced significantly higher than estimated production costs, an assessment by the World Health Organisation (WHO) shows highlighting the “exorbitant” profiteering by pharmaceutical companies and the scope for lowering prices of drugs.
While innovative and newer drugs for cancer, hepatitis C and rare diseases are out of reach of many due to their unaffordable prices, even off patent drugs which are in market for long and commonly used for diseases like HIV, tuberculosis and malaria are priced very high with huge margins over their cost of production.
This results in high expenditure pushing people into poverty. In India over 75% of health expenditure is out-of-pocket, of which the major chunk is spent on medicines. This is despite India being a manufacturing hub and the biggest supplier of low cost generic medicines to the world.
Please click here to read more.