Reward doctors whose visit does not end with a prescription for medicines paid for by the Health Service. This is the proposal launched in recent days in France by a deputy from the UMP (Union for a Popular Movement, President Sarkozy's party) to contain public pharmaceutical expenditure. According to its creator, professor of medicine and surgery in Montpellier, a particularly in-depth dialogue in the context of a longer-than-usual medical visit can significantly reduce the number and cost of prescriptions. The deputy's proposal follows by a few days the report with which the French Court of Auditors had defined the transalpine system of admission to reimbursement and definition of prices "inadequately rigorous and opaque". Furthermore, the accounting judges had deemed the results achieved so far by France in terms of generics insufficient, whose penetration rate (the 20% in volumes) "still remains three times lower than its German and English neighbours". According to the Court, the failure to extend the severance pay (Tarif forfaitaire de responsabilité, a mechanism comparable to the Italian minimum reimbursement price) has an impact on these difficulties, so much so that for magistrates the way forward should be to establish single prices for all active ingredients , generics, therapeutic equivalents, copy drugs and the so-called "counter-generics", medicines very close to the expired patents that companies put on the market to counteract the equivalents.
DoctorNews – September 20, 2011
