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Half of Patients Fight Shy of Exorbitant Medicine Price
At the ongoing 4th Session of the 8th CPPCC of Guangdong Province, the issue of swelling medicine price brought up by deputies from Chinese Peasants' and Workers' Democratic Party, has roused heated discussions. Unreasonable high price of medicine has become a focal problem affecting the immediate interests of the people nationwide.
Statistics say from 1993 to 1998, the number of people suffering from illness rose by 7.3 percent. However, at present 50 percent of the city dwellers, who got sick, refuse to see the doctor, a figure 18.8 percent lower than five years ago. This is even more so in certain medium-or-small-sized cities, where 30 percent of patients who should be hospitalized would rather stay at home for treatment or adopt a conservative way of healing, a decline of 4.3 percent in hospitalization rate. For this, high medicine price should bear the brunt of being blamed.
Puffy medicine price has become a hard nut to crack in medical reforms. Although the government has taken some measures to control or cut down the prices, the result is far from satisfactory. For in over ten thousand varieties of medicines, only 131 of them are priced by the state and another 156 by provincial authorities. Strangely enough, with the unequal and unfair competition surging high the selling of medicines of lowered prices tended to be on the decline whereas those of the same healing effect of higher prices have been on the rise, forming a great disparity between the two.
There are four major causes for high medicine prices, as deputies analyzed.
First, pricing authorities are slack in their work and have failed to give an overall, yet precise appraisal of medicine prices administered by the government.
Secondly, the policy of "relying on medicine sales to support a hospital" has practically turned the medicine selling into a major means for hospital economy. Take hospitals in Guangdong for example, the average medicine sales in 1999 reached 45.1 percent of their whole business turnover, and for some hospitals the figure stood as high as 60 to 70 percent. With medicine prices directly linked up with the revenue, these hospitals would naturally turn down low-priced medicines.
Thirdly, There is a redundant and low level construction in our medical production. The number of China's chemical and pharmaceutical enterprises has increased from a bit over 500 in 1980s to nowadays more than 6,700, but their added-up output equals only to that of a huge foreign enterprise. There are as many as 439 licensed pharmaceutical plants in Guangdong, yet the majority of them are of over production for most of the medicines produced. So they simply raise the ex-factory price by a large margin to leave room for manoeuvring the various fees, discounts and kickbacks in promotion.
Fourthly, there are too many wholesalers meddling with the circulation channels. China's medicine wholesale enterprises have been multiplied ridiculously in number and scale from some 2,000 before the opening up to the present-day 17,000, of which 1641 in Guangdong alone as against only 16,000 hospitals nationwide. On the contrary, most foreign countries only have one to four enterprises of suchlike in a country, and to the maximum eight for a big country like the US. Promotion through high discounts and kickbacks has turned the market competition into a savage dog-fighting for discounts and bribes.
By PD Online staff member Li Heng
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