Breach of national and EU legislation on drug prices by Greece claimed by pharma trade group

12 May 2014

Last week’s meeting of the Greek Pharmaceutical Pricing Committee of the Ministry of Health, which was expected to issue a Corrective Price Bulletin, took the representatives of the pharmaceutical industry by surprise, as once again the Ministry refused to act on the Committee’s recommendation on a correction of all pricing errors, says the Hellenic Association of Pharmaceutical Companies (SfEE).

Although the existing errors have been recognized, they still remain uncorrected, says the SfEE. The Ministry has repeatedly ignored the relevant recommendations and opinions of the Pricing Committee, thereby increasing the risk of supply shortages in the market at the expense of Greek patients. In fact, only certain numerical errors were corrected, while about 600 objections are pending, relating to:

80 unique products which should have been priced at the average of the three lowest prices in the European Union as required by the relevant legislation for cases where corresponding generics with the same active substance are not available on the market;
about 20 products the patent of which was wrongly regarded as expired;
several products that were absent from the previous Price Bulletin, intended mainly for export, but also products for which inconsistencies emerged in the prices of reference countries, either in terms of conversion across different packages or currency mismatches;
cases of domestically manufactured products that have been priced in a manner contrary to applicable legislation; and
several generics for which reference prices and the rate of price reduction relative to corresponding patented products have been misapplied.

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