The Senate is virtually giving Filipinos false hopes when it passed the Cheaper Medicine Bill without creating a Drug Price Regulatory Board that will keep drug prices at affordable levels, a doctor-lawmaker said yesterday.
Iloilo Rep. Ferjenel Biron, principal author of House Bill 001, or the Cheaper Medicine Act of 2007, said the Senate version of the measure whose main proponent is Sen. Mar Roxas, does not assure the reduction of prices of medicine.
Republic Act 7581, or the Price Act of 1991, cannot be invoked “for any price reduction of drugs and medicine because the law is applicable only in cases of national emergency or calamity or in similar occasions.
Biron insisted that a Drug Price Regulatory Board is necessary.
“Let us not give any false hope to our countrymen,” he said. “That is why it is imperative that a Drug Price Regulatory Board has to be established for the sole purpose of regulating drug prices, particularly the life-saving ones.”
He stressed that a continued deregulated policy for the pharmaceutical industry would only render useless the government’s attempt to significantly reduce the prices of medicine, like what the Senate did when it passed the Cheaper Medicine Act.
“The prices of medicine can never be brought down without price regulation. Insofar as concerns in the pharmaceutical industry pricing are concerned, state intervention through legislation should be pursued,” Biron emphasized.
Biron said the version of Roxas will only amend the Intellectual Property Code.
“Amendments to the Intellectual Property Code alone will never bring down prices of drugs and medicines,” Biron, a doctor by profession, said. “That is precisely the reason why the House adopted a more comprehensive approach in addressing the rising cost of medicine.”
A salient feature of the House version of the Cheaper Medicine Act, which is still on second reading, is the establishment of a Drug Price Regulatory Board that “provides for a concrete and quantitative reduction of prices of drugs and medicines.” The board will be headed by the health secretary.
The House of Representatives opened for plenary debates last month the Cheaper Medicine Act of 2007.
The chamber, through Speaker Jose de Venecia, made true its promise to send the bill to the plenary before Congress took its legislative break from Oct. 12 to Nov. 5.