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LATEST NEWS UPDATES | Must poor fast to buy drugs: SC -Dhananjay Mahapatra

Must poor fast to buy drugs: SC -Dhananjay Mahapatra

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published Published on Oct 15, 2012   modified Modified on Oct 15, 2012
-The Times of India

The Centre on Thursday promised to notify a new drug pricing mechanism for essential medicines by the end of November, but the Supreme Court said a change in policy must not force a sharp rise in drug prices to hurt an already hassled common man.

Additional solicitor general Siddharth Luthra informed a bench of Justices G S Singhvi and S J Mukhopadhaya that a Cabinet note on the new Drug Price Control Order (DPCO), approved last month by the empowered group of ministers (EGoM), had been moved and a decision would be taken by mid-November.

Luthra assured the court that the new DPCO would be notified by the department of pharmaceuticals in the ministry of chemicals and fertilizers a week after Cabinet approves the drug pricing formula. The bench said it would take up further hearing on November 27.

As per the EGoM decision, the proposed DPCO shifts the pricing formula from the earlier ‘production cost plus profit margin’ to the present regime under which it would be calculated by taking the average retail cost of a medicine sold by various leading manufacturers.

The bench said it was the government’s prerogative to frame policy and that the courts had nothing to do with it. But it could not muffle its concerns over the impact of essential medicine prices on common man.

It cited a parliamentary committee’s report reflecting how pharmaceutical promotion strategy adopted by drug majors had resulted in doctors, who earlier used to prescribe medicines after understanding the symptoms, advising patients to undergo a series of diagnostic tests and then asking them to take certain medicines of big companies.

The court also drew a contrast between high priced drugs and the Planning Commission’s methodology to count the poor. The commission had said that anyone earning more than Rs 32 a day would not qualify to be categorized as poor.

The bench of Justices Singhvi and Mukhopadhaya said, “These days, the drugs prescribed by doctors are beyond the reach of the common man. An antibiotic would not cost less than Rs 50-60. And here we have a criteria, a yardstick, which prescribes that if one earns Rs 32, he is not below poverty line. So, he has to go hungry for two days to buy an antibiotic.”

Appearing for the NGO ‘All India Drug Action Network’, advocate Colin Gonsalves said that if the new average retail price formula, already approved by the EGoM, was to be accepted by the Cabinet, then the common man would have to pay at least 10 times more than the price that would have been worked out under the DPCO 1995 formula. 

The Times of India, 12 October, 2012, http://epaper.timesofindia.com/Default/Scripting/ArticleWin.asp?From=Archive&Source=Page&Skin=TOINEW&BaseHref=CAP/2012/10/12&PageLabel=11&Enti


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