Fnomceo: "Drugs handbook according to therapeutic equivalence penalizing for citizens"

Fedaisf editorial staff

June 24, 2018

It would increase health inequalities, as well as partial interventions on waiting lists without first increasing the number of specialists.

Ufficio Stampa FNINCeO – Comunicato 21/06/2018

“We learn from an article published today in the newspaper The print that the Minister of Health, the Hon. Giulia Cricket, would be preparing, together with the Regions, a revolution in the pharmaceutical handbook, where medicines would no longer be classified and reimbursed by active ingredient but according to 'homogeneous therapeutic classes'. If the news corresponded to the truth, we would be seriously concerned: initiatives of this kind can in fact have a serious impact on health inequalities, in this case discriminating against those on a lower income, who, not being able to pay for drugs or overprices, would have to be satisfied with the drug which costs less, the only one provided entirely by the National Health Service”.

With these words, the president of the National Federation of Orders of Surgeons and Dentists (Phnomceo) Philip Rings, together with the entire Executive, comments on press reports according to which the Minister, together with the Regions, intends to adopt, as a criterion for reimbursement of medicines, that of "therapeutic equivalence”, according to which to be reimbursed would be the lowest-cost medicine among all those that have the same mechanism of action, even if different in terms of active ingredient.

“As for the waiting lists, they will not be reduced by acting on intramoenia but only by increasing the number of specialists- continues Rings, responding to the statements made yesterday by the Minister on the occasion of the meeting with the Health Commission of the Conference of the Regions -. This proposal would increase inequalities between Regions, penalizing those that have staff shortages".

“What has been reported seems to go in a clearly opposite direction to the programmatic declarations for greater universality and fairness of the National Health Service – concludes the president Phnomceo -. To overturn the responsibility of waiting lists on doctors, rather than on those who manage health care, seems to us completely out of place, just as it is strongly penalizing for citizens to ration spending according to economic logic rather than objectives of appropriateness and health".

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