SfEE Announcement re the findings of market inspections
Announcement
SFEE: Expenditure control and co-responsibility with the State for the overrun, following the findings of market inspections
Athens, 26 September 2018.– With concern, almost indignation, we read the recent news reports about illegal practices in the prescription and sale of medicines and other types of healthcare benefits, as revealed following EOPYY inspections.
SFEE obviously welcomes such efforts by EOPYY and wishes that every source of unlawfulness and abuse be eradicated. At the same time, however, it cannot but feel indignant at seeing that all areas of healthcare, pharmaceuticals in particular, are dominated by the logic of clawback, a logic that has led the state to shake off any responsibility for a rational management of available resources.
Thus, a wrongly determined and insufficient level of public pharmaceutical expenditure, compounded by prescription irregularities or fraud, has brought the pharmaceutical industry to the brink of collapse; the industry gives one in three medicines for free (compared with one in four in 2017), covering, among other things, 100% of the pharmaceutical costs of the uninsured. Any sense of predictability, which is an essential condition for the viability of businesses in the industry, has been overthrown, posing immediate risk to planned investments, jobs and, above all, patient access to existing as well as future medicines.
There is a pressing need to determine public pharmaceutical expenditure on the basis of real needs and to make the state responsible for its control. Co-responsibility for clawback should take retroactive effect from the beginning of 2018. So many retroactive measures have been imposed by the state whenever this serves its purposes, why not impose, for a change, a measure that will contribute to the viability of an industry with a huge positive impact on the health of citizens?
