Welcoming the Government’s plans to make it mandatory for the doctors to prescribe generic drugs, experts have cautioned that without capping prices of such drugs, it will be an exercise in futility as chemists will be charging extra from the customers.
The All India Drug Action Network represented by experts in the drug sector has called for a rational drug policy and said that the proposal to make generic prescription writing mandatory for doctors would be a useless counterproductive step as a standalone measure.
“Unless manufacturers (except those who are marketing medicines still under patent protection) are made to market medicines under generic name for the retail market, consumers will not get the benefit of generic medicines.
“In the absence of universal availability of good quality generic name medicines in retail pharmacy shops, merely getting doctors to start prescribing medicines under generic name will end up in shifting the discretion to pharmacists who are likely to dispense brands that give them more commission,” it said, enlisting four other five steps that would help make generic-medicines affordable and available to people.
Also, all essential and life saving medicines including their chemical analogues and therapeutic equivalents must be brought under price control which would mean significantly expanding the current list of price-controlled medicines.
“Prices of these medicines should be fixed by restoring the cost-based formula which was employed since 1979 unlike ‘market based’ formula,” said the group represented by drug experts like Dr Anant Phadke, Dr Mira Shiva , Dr Anurag Bhargava, Chinu Srinivasan and Dr Gopal Dabade .
Dr G S Grewal, former President of the Punjab Medical Council, has flagged the issue through a letter shot off to Prime Minister Narendra Modi. He said, “once a doctor prescribes a particular salt, it will be up to the chemist to provide particular medicine to the patient. The unscrupulous chemists, because of massive gap in retail price and MRP, will enter the actual retail price in their book and charge patients much higher because MRP is not capped.”
IMA President KK Aggarwal said, India is the largest exporter of generic versions of the drugs in the world as it can manufacture drugs at fraction of a cost compared to international brands. In India, generic versions of drugs can be sold in the name of molecule (generic-generic) or brand (generic-brand).
The only thing that the IMA wants is that all generic versions of drugs in India should be permitted to be sold only at one price by one company. At present, the generic versions are being sold at three different prices (generic-generic, trade-generic and branded-generic) by the same company, he said.