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Healthy Skepticism Library item: 18920

Warning: This library includes all items relevant to health product marketing that we are aware of regardless of quality. Often we do not agree with all or part of the contents.

 

Publication type: news

Taylor L
Qatar abolishes drug price-fixing
Pharma Times 2010 Oct 12
http://www.pharmatimes.com/Article/10-10-12/Qatar_abolishes_drug_price-fixing.aspx


Full text:

Qatar is to abolish government controls on medicines prices and open up the market to competition, in order to tackle current drug shortages and high price levels.

The cabinet has now approved the draft of a new law which will abolish the current exclusive dealerships held by a small number of importers and also end the setting of wholesale and retail drug prices by the Supreme Council of Health (SCH)’s Pharmacy and Drug Control Department. This process currently provides profit margins of 10% for importers and close to 30% for medicines retailers.

The new law will be enacted as part of Qatar’s public health strategy for 2011-2016, and follows an investigation by the SCH into complaints by consumers about high prices and non-availability of some drugs.

“The proposed law aims to address the shortage of certain drugs in the market and make quality medicines available to all at affordable prices,” said Dr Salih Ali Al Marri, assistant secretary general for medical affairs at the SCH. Opening up the market could lead to a fall in prices, he added, but also emphasised that the issuing of new import licenses will be subject to strict regulations and standards in order to ensure product safety and quality, reports The Peninsula newspaper.

It also quotes Dr Aisha Al Ansari, director of the Pharmacy and Drug Control Department, as stating that her officials would no longer “interfere” with prices, and that these will now be decided by demand and supply mechanisms in the open market. She added, however, that monitoring of the market will be strengthened to ensure the safety and quality of imported medicines.

Under Qatar’s present system, registered importers are responsible for the quality of the products which they bring into the country, and they are required to produce documentation showing that the drugs conform to international standards and are approved for sale in neighbouring countries such as Kuwait, Saudi Arabia and United Arab Emirates (UAE). Opening up the market to more companies will create an enormous challenge in terms of monitoring for quality, the importers warn.

- Last month, Business Monitor International (BMI) forecast strong growth for pharmaceutical sales in Qatar, projecting annual increases averaging 10.1% to 2014, when it expects the market to be worth 1.37 billion riyals compared to 848 million riyals in 2009.

 

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Far too large a section of the treatment of disease is to-day controlled by the big manufacturing pharmacists, who have enslaved us in a plausible pseudo-science...
The blind faith which some men have in medicines illustrates too often the greatest of all human capacities - the capacity for self deception...
Some one will say, Is this all your science has to tell us? Is this the outcome of decades of good clinical work, of patient study of the disease, of anxious trial in such good faith of so many drugs? Give us back the childlike trust of the fathers in antimony and in the lancet rather than this cold nihilism. Not at all! Let us accept the truth, however unpleasant it may be, and with the death rate staring us in the face, let us not be deceived with vain fancies...
we need a stern, iconoclastic spirit which leads, not to nihilism, but to an active skepticism - not the passive skepticism, born of despair, but the active skepticism born of a knowledge that recognizes its limitations and knows full well that only in this attitude of mind can true progress be made.
- William Osler 1909