Exorbitant drug prices take heavy toll on public health

Staff Reporter :
People are continuously losing affordability in healthcare because of the growing prices of essential drugs in the country.
The Directorate General of Drug Administration (DGDA) source said that the country’s top six companies have recently increased the prices of 234 essential drugs by 10 to 50 per cent.
However, another 10 companies have applied to the regulatory authority to increase the prices of their medicines, it informed.

Heath experts said that the drug companies are forcibly increasing the price of drugs with surplus value because of increasing the dollar value in the international and domestic markets.
Bangladesh depends on imported raw materials for manufacturing drugs. The prices of raw materials are increasing in the global market, but the alarming factor is the rate of price hike of medicine in the local market. It is not following any proportion or ratio, they observed.

After visiting several pharmacies in the capital it is seen that about 70 percent of the drugs are being sold at higher prices in the retail market.
The sellers of those drugstores said that they have to buy medicine from the wholesale market at a higher price. The price hike tendency was started from March, 2020 during the start of Covid-19. Since then, the market has gradually become more and more volatile.

The owner of a drug store in Mitford Hospital area, Shagor Shaha, told The New Nation that in the last several months, the price of medicine has been increasing constantly. Some of the drug stores take this as an opportunity which makes things worse.

Hafizul Islam a middle-aged person working at a private firm said he and his wife are suffering from diseases like high-blood pressure and Asthma. The price of the medicine of those diseases is increasing constantly.
”The daily commodity prices are already cornering me. However, the price of medicine has increased by an alarming margin. Now, either I have to reduce the medication or stop taking,” he added. As Out-of-pocket (OOP) healthcare expenditure in Bangladesh has been growing at an alarming pace, the current price hike of medicine further cornering the common people.

Out-of-pocket (OOP) expenses, it can be noted, are people’s share of the expenses for medical care that aren’t reimbursed by public or private insurances.
According to Bangladesh National Health Accounts (BNHA) data, in 2012 the Out-of-pocket (OOP) expenditure was 62 per cent while in last ten years it deteriorated by 10 per cent. Concurringly, data from the World Health Organization (WHO) suggests that the figure was 74 percent.

Although the government’s decade-old promise to bring it down to 32 percent by 2032. Meanwhile, Bangladesh ranks 144th out of 145 countries in terms of out-of-pocket expenditure onhealth per capita as percentage of GNI per capita. Bangladesh ranks 184th out of 186 countries in terms of general government healthexpenditure-GDP ratio.
In the current financial year of FY23, the government’s allocation on health is only by 0.83 per cent of the GDP while the global standard (median value) is 3.44 percent .