Berset wants to save 250 million on medicines: if you want the original, you have to pay extra

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Next Tuesday, Health Minister Alain Berset (51) will have to announce a new premium shock when he leaves the state government. Because healthcare costs continue to rise.

As if to show how hard he is trying to reduce costs, the SP Federal Council presented another smaller reform on Friday. In concrete terms, he wants to reduce medicine costs again. And by doing that Generic drugs, i.e. cheaper copycat products, are more strongly promoted.

Generic or self-pay

The Swiss love original medicines: generic medicines are still prescribed less often than abroad. To change that, Berset is now tightening the screw. On the one hand, the prices of generic medicines are being reduced slightly further. On the other hand, part of the responsibility is passed on to the patients.

Anyone who really wants the original preparation at the pharmacy will have to dig deeper into their wallets in the future: the deductible will be increased from the current 20 to 40 percent. With both measures, Berset wants to save 250 million francs per year. That is approximately 0.7 premium percent.

Doctors and pharmacists are not held responsible: they are not obliged to prescribe generic medicines. A solution that addressed sales margin had to be postponed at short notice. The plan was to slightly increase the margin for cheap drugs – for example, the Dafalgan prescription would have been almost five francs more expensive – and reduce it for more expensive drugs. Berset had estimated the savings potential at 60 million francs.

Better access to medicines

The changes that Berset prescribes also have consequences for expensive specialty medicines. Cancer patients in particular are often dependent on medicines that are not covered by basic insurance, because they are not yet on the so-called specialist list. In this case, they are dependent on the goodwill of their health insurers: they can pay for the often very expensive therapy in individual cases, but that is not necessary. This has led to unequal treatment in the past.

That should change: health insurers will be obliged to use the same instrument to calculate whether expensive therapies also have a ‘high benefit’. Only then do you have to pay for the medicines. If the health insurer rejects a request, it will have to justify this to the treating doctor and the patient in the future.

The pharmaceutical industry is critical of price cuts

Berset also turns the price screw when it comes to this per-case reimbursement. The specialties list now includes binding fixed price discounts of 30 to 40 percent. The size of the discount depends on the benefit of the drug: the higher it is for the patient, the more the manufacturer gets. This does not achieve anything, but Berset wants to increase the pressure on pharmaceutical companies to have the drug added to the specialty list.

Interpharma, the association of the research-based pharmaceutical industry, already sees the skin swimming: DIn a statement, he criticizes that the sector once again has to give huge discounts on net prices, which in some cases means that it can no longer offer its products at a cost-covering level. (sf)

Source:Blick