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Friday, March 04, 2005
Ilonggo solon files bill to regulate drug prices
FOURTH District Representative Ferjenel Biron filed a bill seeking to regulate the prices of medicines and stop the collusion between multinational pharmaceutical companies and a giant drugstore chain.
Biron, in his privilege speech early this week, said "a Philippine-style drug cartel involving multinational firms and a giant drugstore chain is causing the skyrocketing prices of medicines, (reaching) unaffordable levels and compounding the day-to-day suffering of millions of Filipinos and killing them without a fight."
The solon, a medical doctor who owns the drug company, PharmaWealth, and a chain of drugstores in Iloilo, said these groups "are bleeding the people dry by their collusive, insidious operations transforming the Philippine drug price index among the highest in Asia and the whole world."
He, however, failed to name the "biggest drugstore chain" he was referring to.
According to Biron, the deregulation of the pharmaceutical industry "failed to produce the right results as multinational drug manufacturers jack up their prices almost at will while the country's biggest drugstore chain reaps a windfall profit as much as 40 percent of retail prices."
"This is the reason why the giant drugstore chain can afford to grant the 20 percent discount to senior citizens as mandated by law. The small drugstores could not because of the limited 10 percent retail mark-up they have to live with," he said.
"Just imagine, the same Paracetamol sold in Asia, using the same raw materials, incurring the same transfer costs, and coming from the same source abroad is much more expensive in the Philippines than anywhere else," Biron added.
The imposition of price control in drugs is not a strange idea, he said. "The successful experience of India when it decided to impose the same on medicine prices in 1970 validates this proposition."
"It's a double whammy for the captive Filipino consumers," Biron said. "The multinational drug companies rob them from behind while this giant drug store chain that has sprouted in all corners of the archipelago robs them in broad daylight."
The bill, co-authored by Iloilo's Fifth District Representative Rolex Suplico and First District Representative Garin, and Agusan del Sur Representative Rodolfo Plaza, provides for the creation of a Drug Price Regulatory Board under the supervision of the Department of Trade and Industry, the primary task of which is to roll back the prices of medicines to realistic and reasonable levels.
(March 4, 2005 issue)
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