PharmExec | Julian
Upton
Pharma and healthcare are among the many areas being
viewed with increasing attention inside and outside Greece, following the
victory in the country’s elections of the radical left-wing, anti-austerity
Syriza party (a victory it secured by forming a coalition with the right-wing
Independent Greeks party).
Healthcare is very much on Syriza’s agenda: the party
has described Greece’s compromised access-to-healthcare situation as a
"humanitarian crisis”. The country’s new prime minister, Alexis Tsipras,
was barely through the doors of the Presidential Mansion when he filed a decree
to restructure the Greek Ministry of Health.
To improve access for the country’s poorest citizens,
Tsipras wants to make significant reductions to co-payments paid by Greek
patients for prescription medicines; he has tasked the Ministry of Health to
once again issue social insurance funds. A restructuring of primary care is also
on the cards.
Greece owes its creditors — the European Financial
Stability Facility, the International Monetary Fund, and the European Central
Bank — around €315 bn ($355 bn); Syriza’s promise to overhaul the country’s
repayment plan is of course a major factor in propelling the party to victory.
Syriza says its plans to boost public health spending can be achieved by
clearing tax arrears, backlogs in social insurance contributions and combating
tax fraud.
However, Greece has already been pushing its luck with
non-payment of its pharma debts. As in-Pharma Technologist’s
Gareth MacDonald points out, as of
November last year, for example, the country owed Merck & Co. $71m for
drugs supplied on credit, and accounts for part of the $907m Pfizer is still
owed from crisis-hit Europe. Syriza’s rejection of the strictest austerity
measures is not likely to see these pharma debts settled any time soon.
Syriza wants to bolster Greece's indigenous pharma industry with increased
production of "high-quality generics". But IHS.com writes that "Greek producers have also been adversely affected by
pricing regulation changes introduced last year, which resulted in drastic
reductions in the prices of generics". And of Syriza's bid to increase the
current level of pharmaceutical reimbursement (€2 bn) by €350m, IHS adds that
while this increase is not particularly high, "considering the lengths to
which the previous government was going to in order to keep reimbursement
spending down, it is a massive change”. As such, "many questions
remain" about how Syriza will deliver on its pharma and healthcare promises
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