China vows to cut drug prices to appease angry public
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China said on Wednesday it would lower the retail prices of 22 kinds of medicine as a means of reeling in some of the soaring costs of health care sparking social discontent across the country.
The failure of health reforms and rising costs of medical care have become flash points for social anger and unrest in China, where hundreds of millions of people cannot afford to see doctors or get medicine.
The National Development and Reform Commission’s new price caps for more than 400 specific products would translate into an average 40 percent savings for consumers, the powerful government body said in a statement on its Web site, http://www.ndrc.gov.cn.
“The 22 medicines were chosen because they are widely used in clinical practice,” the statement said, adding the selected drugs were the ones most often complained about by the public.
In China, retail prices of many medicines stood at 10 times their factory-gate costs, Xinhua news agency reported, mostly the result of profit-hungry hospitals. Health Minister Gao Qiang has accused greedy hospitals of charging excessive fees and prescribing unnecessary and expensive medications.
Another factor behind climbing prices are the layers of middlemen between factories and patients.
The Ministry of Health pledged in May to slash drug prices, but no concrete steps were taken until Wednesday’s announcement.
“The move, which aims to instill market order and relieve the high cost of medicine, one of the key complaints of the Chinese people, has the potential to save consumers about 4 billion yuan ($495 million),” Xinhua quoted an unnamed official as saying.
In August, a security guard unable to afford treatment jumped to his death from a 19-storey hospital window, just weeks after a farmer suffering lung cancer and too poor to get care set off a bomb in bus in a southern city, killing himself and another passenger and wounding 30 people.
In its statement, the NDRC pledged to continue pricing reforms and to “work hard to lessen the public burden of unfair medicine prices”.
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