What is the reality regarding mandatory returns – The mockery must end!
Halandri, November 6th, 2023.- On the occasion of the publication of recent articles stating that Greece achieved the Recovery Fund’s goal of reducing the clawback of 2022, we would like to make known the following:
- It is known that from 2012 onwards pharmaceutical companies finance the pharmaceutical expenditure of the State through mandatory returns described as rebates and clawback.
- Since then the pharmaceutical companies have returned to the State more than €14 billion from their invoiced sales through mandatory returns.
- These mandatory returns every year are greater than the previous year and in 2022 -for the first time ever- they exceeded the State’s contribution to pharmaceutical expenditure by at least €200 million. This is an unsustainable European record.
- The State committed under the RRP (Recovery Fund) to reduce the levels of total returns (through a reduction in clawback) compared to 2020, from 2022 to 2025 by applying “efficiency enhancement measures” rather than accounting alchemy.
- Therefore, instead of substantially financing expenditure on the one hand and substantial measures to control and contain expenditure on the other, it drags pharmaceutical companies into compulsory and exhaustive negotiations, forcing them to pay in advance what they would more or less pay (perhaps a little more) through the current mechanism of mandatory returns. Therefore, there is no issue of additional “savings” of € 544 million as some articles state.
- As a result, the situation continues to deteriorate for businesses, while the State boasts that it has “achieved the clawback reduction target compared to 2020”, while mandatory returns in 2022 are at least €500 million more than in 2020. Overtaxation has no limits.
- If we get at some point in our country that we will be looking for established medicines or we will not have success to new innovative treatments available, the responsibility does not lie in the least with the pharmaceutical companies. Already the new treatments come to our country with a delay of 680 days.
We believe that the new Minister of Health has understood the dimensions of the problem and is moving towards a better solution, for the benefit of Public Health and jobs in the sector.
This mockery of the supposed reduction in compulsory returns must stop!
THE BOARD OF DIRECTORS OF SFEE
