Current pharma pricing policy will hurt both patients and industry in the long run, assert pharma experts

Pharmaceutical analysts in India and the UK believe cost-based pricing is not suitable to safeguard the interests of patients as well as the pharmaceutical industry. In their opinion, the regulatory authorities have wrongly been focusing on price controls in the belief this will boost access to health care. But the experience of other nations, and India’s past experience, indicates the desired outcome will not be achieved via price caps because multiple hurdles hinder health care access in India – and it is these that need to be addressed.

David Taylor, Professor of Pharmaceutical and Public Health Policy at UCL School of Pharmacy, University of London, UK, stated: “The efficacy of modern medicines has pushed average life expectancy in India from little more than 40 years in the 1960s, closer to the world average of about 67 years. But this success has sparked an increase in non-communicable diseases, which present-day treatments cannot cure. The situation makes it imperative to support the search for innovative drugs that cure such ailments. Price caps have the opposite effect, though, by disincentivizing the sale of innovative drugs or drug research in India. Patients with incurable endemic diseases will continue to suffer in silence since cures for such diseases may no longer be actively researched.”

Keeping this in mind, Prof Taylor believes health care authorities should avoid cost-based pricing or price caps. Instead, a balance is required between the public need for low-priced drugs, and societal needs for sustained innovation and access to affordable health care. Under the draft National Pharmaceutical Pricing Policy, expansion of the Essential Medicines list could include a wider range of products, backed by a narrowly-defined, cost-based pricing system. If this scenario comes true, producing and selling drugs for such treatments in India would be so unviable that supplies will be curbed, not increased.