Meeting with the Minister of Health – October 15, 2024
Announcement SFEE
Minimal improvement in funding for hospital medicines over €30 in 2023: The State funds 2.4 medicines out of 10, while the remaining 7.6 are funded by the pharmaceutical industry
Halandri, October 16, 2024. – Ten months after the end of 2023, the Government has realized that the hospital budget for medicines in 2023 was insufficient.
This inadequacy has been demonstrated by recent notes, which indicate that the returns for medicines over €30 for the first half of 2023 reached 82.9%!
It is an unfortunate coincidence that in October 2024 there is a significant challenge in adjusting State expenditure for the previous year. This was evident in yesterday’s meeting, where we were informed of an additional funding of only €20 million, combined with internal reallocations of clawback and additions to the expenditure of closed budget residues. No one should expect that the pharmaceutical sector can be sustainable with returns of approximately 75% (instead of 82.9%)…
We appreciate the efforts of the Ministry of Health to address the issues in hospitals, noting that it is the first channel that has reached a point of extreme unsustainability, and we stand by the commitments that returns for hospital medicines in 2024 will be lower than those in 2022, which were also extremely high (69%) and must be significantly reduced in the coming years.
We also value the efforts to reduce spending and increase the return on investment in medicine. However, the major problem that remains is the underfunding of the sector, which is a result of the MoUs, which belong to the past since 2018. Since then, we have observed that only 1 in 5 new medicines are available in Greece, with our country significantly maintaining the title of the European champion in pharmaceutical industry returns.
This situation calls into question patients’ access to existing as well as new innovative therapies, acknowledging that medicine represents only 15% of total health expenditure across Europe, which makes it necessary for the State to redefine its priorities.
