Saving money and drugs cannot rely on "strengthening the needle"

The emergency situation of the shortage of protamine injections is expected to be alleviated. It is reported that under the concerns of all parties, the State Food and Drug Administration has been actively coordinating related companies and launching emergency production.

A proton protein of about 10 yuan is a medicine that must be used in cardiac surgery. At present, there is no substitute medicine and it is called a "rescuing medicine." Such "irreplaceable", it should be said that the darling of pharmaceutical companies, why is the shortage is not due to the sharp increase in market demand, but because the pharmaceutical plant initiative to stop production?

What makes people worry is that the causes and conditions of such shortages have been frequently staged in cheap drugs. One yuan 1 chloramphenicol eye drops, a few dollars a box of norfloxacin, 8 yuan 100 pieces of periodontal Ling tablets, etc., almost all disappeared in the country. According to a survey of clinical drug use in 42 hospitals in 12 cities in China, there were 342 low-cost medicines in hospitals, of which 130 were under 10 yuan and drugs under 5 were 69%.

Relying on the government's emergency response, the "life-saving drug"'s "life" has finally made people feel relieved. However, "lesions" are not eliminated, and "strengthening acupuncture" can only be a temporary effect. Why is it that it is difficult for patients to welcome medicines that are favored by manufacturers? The deep reason requires deep thinking.

The shortage of classic cheap drugs first revealed the imperfections of drug price management in China. The prices of medicines in China are subject to government pricing, government guidance prices, or market adjustment prices. The drug-guided price is the "price limit for drugs", which is called "the ceiling price of drugs." The government hopes to lower the cost of visiting the doctors and ease the "expensiveness". However, the "ceiling price" is a double-edged sword, which suppresses the high drug prices and also kills cheap drugs.

Protamine is a cheap old drug that has been used for decades. The “stop production” of a company is also a kind of market instinct. Once the drug cost price is higher than the market price, the disappearance of cheap classic drugs is not difficult to understand.

Therefore, to save cheap drugs, we must rely not only on the "strength" of emergency production, but also on the "disease". Only when dynamic pricing of drugs is implemented, a strict cost monitoring system is established, the price of drugs is determined through expert assessment, industry review, etc., and the openness and democratization of the pricing process are strengthened, so as to prevent both the false declaration costs of pharmaceutical companies and the rationality of cheap drugs. Costs form a reasonable pricing mechanism for drugs.

Preventing drugs from "cutting down prices" also requires the government to use regulatory measures to ensure that drugs do not "tender to death" due to low-price competition. Beijing has stipulated in the procurement process for drug bidding that there is no need for bids for low-priced shortage drugs. Those low-cost medicines such as injections below one yuan and capsules under one dime are directly linked to net prices to form catalogs of low-priced medicines and shortage medicines. This approach works well and many low-cost medicines can be reproduced in the market. .

The shortage of cheap drugs is also a microcosm of many problems in medical reform. If the mechanism of public hospitals to use medicine to provide medicine is not changed, high-priced medicines are naturally more popular than cheap medicines. The reason is very simple. Only when high-priced medicines are opened, the larger the doctor's rebate will be, the more profit the hospital will have.

In this sense, only from the macro perspective of medical reform, cut off the interest chain between hospitals and medicines, so that medicines can return to its purely curative properties, and cheap drugs will not always “death.”