Reform needs to break medicine interest chain

A Chinese clerk adjusts medicines for sale on a shelf at a pharmacy in Hangzhou city, east China's Zhejiang province, 5 May 2015. [Photo/IC]

Since the caps on the prices of retail medicines were lifted, the cost of buying many medicines has risen. A resident in Xi'an, Shaanxi province in Northwest China, for example, found that the price of the digoxin tablets he takes has risen from 6.7 to 68 yuan ($11) per box. Comments:

It is high circulation costs that lead to the high prices of medicine. From the production line to the hospital, then to the prescription of the doctor, every step costs money. When there is corruption involved, the cost can be astonishingly high. Worse, the caps on retail prices hardly help because the corrupt can always find a way to evade them. It is time to introduce a new mechanism to lower medicine prices that suits the market environment.

People's Daily, June 8

The rising price of one single medicine does not equal a general rise in medicine prices, but the problem of medicine prices rising after the reform should arouse our concern. According to the reform, the market, instead of the State, primarily decides the price of medicines, but the State still needs to intervene in order to maintain market order and prevent producers forming price alliances with each other to maintain irrationally high prices. Supervision is still needed in this industry as it concerns people's health, even lives.

Ju Shi, media commentator, June 6

Sometimes a cap on medicine retail prices does not help poor people, because it will shrink the profit margin for producers, who in turn will resort to producing medicines with higher margins instead. Take the digoxin tablet mentioned in the news, for example, only two companies are still producing it because the profits are so low.

Beijing News, June 8

An interest chain has long been formed among medicine producers, medicine sales agencies and certain hospitals that profit by prescribing expensive medicines. If the market-oriented reform only frees the market from government intervention but fails to break the interest chain, medicine prices might rise even more, which is against the aim of the reform.

cnhubei.com, June 8