GRTU - ‘We will not accept mandatory pricing’ on meds
Raphael Vassallo Vince Farrugia, director-general of the Small Businesses Chamber (GRTU), has warned that he will direct his association’s members to resist any direct government intervention in the medicines sector, after Budget 2010 hinted at a temporary ‘mandatory pricing’ regime for pharmaceuticals.
“Let make this very clear: the Chamber will not accept any government interference in the market. We will direct our members to withdraw supply of those products affected by price control measures, until forced pricing is removed.”
In an interview with MaltaToday, the outspoken GRTU director-general claims that government is under political and social pressure to “do something” about the skyrocketing price of medicines. However, its past efforts had backfired badly.
“A few years back, government introduced a very costly registration system whereby importers of pharmaceuticals would register the medicines they import on a schedule,” Farrugia said. “However, the cost of registration was prohibitive – sometimes as much as Lm20,000 for a single product. In practice, the result of this system was that importers would only stock those products which it could afford to register – i.e, the ones it imported in large enough quantities to mitigate the cost of registration.”
This resulted in shortages of a number of medicines, with the result that government had to register these pharmaceuticals itself through the Health Department.
“We should have learnt from this experience,” Farrugia said, “but if government re-introduces price-control, it would be clear that it has learnt nothing.”
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