As though the relentless hike in essential prices was not enough, the rising cost of drugs has come as yet another blow to the common people. Since last August when the nation was in the midst of a crisis born of political uprising, the prices of medicines went through the roof. Going by a report published in this paper on December 25, between August and November, prices of antibiotics, painkillers for post-operative patients, drugs for fever and allergy, to name but a few, have increased from around 10 per cent to 100 per cent. Evidently, it is the lack of proper monitoring by the regulating authorities, the Directorate General of Drug Administration (DGDA), for instance, that this unacceptable situation has arisen in the medicine market.
Notably, like essential commodities related to food, drugs, particularly the lifesaving ones, are also indispensable to patients who are dependent on those for their survival. Unlike the consumers in a kitchen market, the buyers of medicines have little choice but to go by what their doctors decide. Some experts would like to call this the characteristics of a captive market dictated by the drug companies. As reports go, some 50 lifesaving drugs have experienced such irrational price hike. In this connection, an official of the DGDA did reportedly admit that the drug regulator had approved some minor adjustments (5.0 to 6.0 per cent) to the drug prices. The DGDA, as could be learnt, fixes the prices of some 117 essential drugs. In that case, pricing of the rest hundreds of medicines is left to the mercy of the pharmaceutical companies. Obviously, the rampant rise in prices of essential drugs can evidently be attributed to the drug manufacturers. Clearly, the drug-makers are holding the hapless consumers of these life-saving medicines hostage. The pharmaceutical companies, not unlike the wholesalers of essential commodities, also have their points to justify the increase in drug prices. Those include, for instance, the rise in dollar (US dollar) price against Bangladesh Taka (BDT), which pushes up import cost of the raw materials for medicines, rise in the cost of power and gas, cost hike in transportation, packaging and so on and so forth.
Against this backdrop, the volatility of the drug market calls for bringing it under strict monitoring of the relevant of authorities including the DGDA. Most importantly, there is the compulsion of protecting patients suffering from contagious, terminal and various killer diseases. Data of 2020, the latest available, from the National Health Accounts, a branch of the government's Health Economics Unit, show that in Bangladesh, the Out-Of-Pocket (OOP) expenditure on health is the second highest in the world at 68.5 per cent, whereas the World Health Organization's (WHO's) recommended maximum is 20 per cent.
Reportedly, the OOP spending on healthcare in the low income countries was, on an average, 35.25 per cent. So, by the WHO's standard, with OOP healthcare spending taking more than 40 per cent share of the poor people's capacity, it is already in the category of what the UN body terms 'catastrophic'. Needless to say, this has to do with the previous government's stingy allocations ranging between 4.2 and 6.0 per cent of the national budgets during the past one and a half decades. So, when the government is sharing little or nothing in the poor's healthcare costs, the drug companies have entered the scene raising medicine prices at will. It is time, the government put its foot down to bring the medicine market under control and end common people's suffering.
