The TAR of Abruzzo agreed with the Regional Council in the appeal brought by the multinational drug company AstraZeneca. In fact, a sentence passed last Friday declared the inadmissibility of the company's appeal, which requested the annulment of a resolution of the Regional Council, dated 10 October 2006, which prepared measures to contain pharmaceutical expenditure, thus avoiding forms of co-participation by the beneficiaries, but setting prescription limits for some medicines. The resolution was based on the assumption that "the expenditure data for drugs in the period January-June 2006 - reports the sentence - would have shown an increase in the number of prescriptions, with a consequent increase in expenditure and with a greater prescription of more expensive drugs which led, as at 31 December 2006, to an overrun of the expenditure ceiling". Hence the measures adopted by the Region, which identified four categories of medicinal products responsible, in the first half of 2006, for the greatest expenditure. Among these, that of proton pump inhibitors, to which esomeprazole belongs, marketed by AstraZeneca under the name of Nexium, for which "a prescription limit was set against doctors and pharmaceutical services equal to an amount not exceeding 0.90 euros per day of therapy". The Regional Administrative Court therefore deemed the appeal inadmissible because "the contested provision falls within the interest of the appellant company solely and jointly with regard to the provisions on the methods of prescribing and dispensing proton pump inhibitors - reads the sentence - given that the company markets drugs based on omeprazole and esomeprazole. But - the administrative judges affirmed - the nature of the planning act of the resolution determines that it contains a multiplicity of provisions concerning the broad subject of pharmaceutical assistance in the area and which have neither character nor media on closer inspection, neither the concreteness nor the actuality of interest in appealing against the provisions of the measure concerning the imposed prescribability constraints of certain drugs on the part of the NHS can be discerned. In essence - concludes the TAR - the marketing of pharmaceutical products cannot bear in itself a current and concrete interest, such as to legitimize the action against a planning act of such scope as the one subject to the appeal. Nor can any violation of citizens' right to health be considered perpetrated".
Source “pharmacist33”
