Drug prices: The State is wasting millions every year by paying "top dollar" for certain drugs when there are cheaper equivalents available, it was claimed yesterday.
The Association of Pharmaceutical Manufacturers of Ireland (APMI) made the claim when it called for incentives for GPs to prescribe cheaper generic drugs.
Generics are identical copies of original name-brand drugs on which patents have expired.
Rory O'Riordan, chairman of the APMI, said €15 million could be saved on cholesterol-lowering drugs alone if off-patent versions were prescribed more often.
The amount the State pays for drugs under the medical card and reimbursement schemes, as well as on drugs supplied to hospitals, is agreed with the association representing the large multinational drug companies, the Irish Pharmaceutical Healthcare Association (IPHA), and the APMI every five years. The deal is up for renegotiation in a few weeks and the APMI wants the Department of Health to agree to pay a standard price for all off-patent drugs. At present, the State pays a higher price for the original version of a drug and a lower price for the identical generic version.
Mr O'Riordan said drug reimbursement schemes would cost the Government over €1 billion this year, yet generic drugs accounted for less than 7 per cent of this. This meant the Government and patients were paying higher prices than necessary for drugs which were off-patent, he said.
"At present, statin drugs are costing the Government over €130 million per annum. Two original drugs are now off-patent - Simvastatin and Pravastatin - and identical multiple versions are now available on the market at lower prices, yet the originator products continue to hold over 90 per cent market share, meaning that 90 per cent of the time the Government is paying top dollar. We have calculated that if the prescription of branded generics in this class was increased by 40 per cent, it could save as much as €15 million," he said.
He suggested the savings could be used for other services, such as tackling problems in A&E.
He emphasised that despite costing about 25 per cent less than the original products, generics undergo the same stringent approval process by the Irish Medicines Board as the original product."One of the problems now is that there is no strong incentive for doctors to use them. We believe our proposal puts the motivation into patients' hands to reduce costs."
Other countries had already made savings by greater use of branded generics, he said. In Germany, branded generics account for more than 38 per cent of the market and in Portugal prescribing of generics has grown from 2 per cent to 12 per cent in the past three years since proposals similar to what the APMI is suggesting were implemented.
A number of recent reports for the Department of Health, including the Brennan report, have already called for greater use of branded generics.
A spokesman for the Minister for Health Mary Harney said it was the Government's objective to maximise the use of generic drugs in the interests of ensuring better value for consumers and the taxpayer.
"The issue of the penetration of generic drugs will form an important part of the forthcoming negotiations," he said.
The IPHA said doctors already prescribed generics where they thought it appropriate to do so.
"To introduce a reference pricing system could remove or lessen doctors' freedom to exercise their clinical judgment. This would be a regressive step and could lead to a two-tier system where those who could afford it would get the medicine of the doctors' choice whereas poorer patients might not," it said.