More efficient medicine policies needed for patient access, says trade group

The European Union commitment to ensuring equity of access to healthcare is challenged by the limited financial capacity of governments to cover growing demand for healthcare services. Generic and biosimilar medicines provide the greatest opportunity to improve access to safe and effective medicines through efficient medicines policies, says a posting by Medicines for Europe, a trade group representing generic and biosimilar drugmakers.

The European Semester Country Specific Recommendations show that healthcare systems need to improve in terms of efficiency.

Governments should adopt medicines policies that support the use of generic and biosimilar medicines to generate the sustained benefits of competition over the long-term. Short-sighted and radical cost-containment measures (such as External Reference Pricing (ERP), single winner tendering, payback/clawback policies and mandated price cuts), endanger medicines supply reliability and ultimately patient health, as is underlined in the Commission’s assessment of the situation in Romania.