The AIFA Board of Directors has approved the structural measures for the management of pharmaceutical expenditure, giving a mandate to the General Management to issue the relative provision by 15 July 2006.
These measures include:
1) a further temporary reduction in the public price of medicines, however dispensed or used by the NHS, from the current 4.4% to 5%, confirming the exclusions already envisaged in the previous measure dated 30 December 2005. This reduction makes it possible to cover, in 2006, completely and definitively, the overrun of the pharmaceutical expenditure ceiling programmed for 2005, for the share of 60% paid by private subjects;
2) a maneuver to revise the National Pharmaceutical Handbook (NFP) which provides for a selective and temporary reduction in the price of medicines up to a maximum of 12% and until the recovery of the part of its competence. This maneuver refers to medicines which in the first quarter of 2006 recorded an increase above the sector average, without there being a justified epidemiological reason; and in any case this corresponds to a necessary rebalancing between spending and consumption.
However, the maneuver became necessary during the year, as the increase in spending in the first 4 months of 2006 compared to the same months of 2005, recorded an increase of +9.9%, data also confirmed by the first estimates of the month of May 2006. This increase in expenditure is so worrying as to require prompt action, to avoid a breach of the 2006 pharmaceutical expenditure ceiling at the end of the year, which is difficult to cover in the final balance.
In any case, it should be noted that the temporary and selective cut in prices will not have any consequences on the levels of pharmaceutical assistance and on the possibility of access to medicines which will in any case be guaranteed to all citizens; in any case it is a maneuver to contain consumption which does not make the market profitability negative.
It should also be emphasized that the maneuver excludes medicines for children, anticancer medicines, generic-equivalent medicines included in the transparency lists, extractive and recombinant DNA blood products, innovative medicines marketed in 2005 and medicine packs essential but with a price lower than €5.
Overall, the maneuver launched by the AIFA Board of Directors is estimated at €388 million, to which must be added the effect of generic-equivalent medicines (estimated at €60 million) and the effect of moderating consumption generated by the maneuver as such.
The selectivity of the Prontuary revision provision concerns 502 packs out of 4799 (equal to 10.5%) and refers to 98 companies out of 374 operating on the national territory (26.4%).
The provisions of the BoD, in ensuring expenditure governance consistent with planned economic availability, were taken within an overall platform aimed at ensuring at the same time the governance and development of the pharmaceutical sector. In this regard, AIFA renews its commitment to the pharmaceutical sector and to each individual company, to guarantee the conditions for investment in research and development in the pharmaceutical sector in Italy.
