“APMGR announces that due to the completely unfavorable fiscal framework and pricing policy of the generic medicine industry, thousands of affordable medicines have disappeared from the market and entire prescription drug production lines have been closed.
According to APMGR data, over 2,000 affordable drugs have already disappeared from the market in recent years, of which 700 drugs disappeared in 2015 alone.
When we talk about generic drugs, we are talking about affordable drugs, those drugs essential for millions of patients, especially for the chronic ones, which address some basic therapeutic areas such as cardiovascular and digestive diseases, cancer, diseases of the central nervous system and respiratory systemDamian said.
At the same time, APMGR points out that, lately, almost 500 employees have been laid off, and this trend will continue if the authorities maintain the same regulatory framework.
“Local producers will be forced to close their production facilities in Romania, to drastically reduce their product portfolio, to make layoffs and to postpone investments in local production sites.
The entire industry producing generic drugs has been going through a dangerous process of decapitalization and decompetitization for over four years, given that the APMGR member companies paid for the clawback tax over one billion lei between 2012 and 2015 “, said the APMGR representative .
Dragos Damian called on Parliament to urgently approve the introduction of a differentiated calculation of the clawback tax to stop the disappearance of affordable medicines, in the context in which the bill providing for this calculation formula for generic medicines only needs the vote of the Committee on Budgets. Chamber of Deputies and plenary of the forum to be adopted.
“At the moment, it is up to parliamentarians and politicians to stop the decline of the local pharmaceutical industry and ensure that patients find their medicines on a daily basis in pharmacies. We must emphasize that the introduction of the differentiated clawback tax has no effect on on the contrary, it will have positive effects on the state budget, because cheap medicines will remain on the market and will not be replaced by more expensive alternatives. (…)
We have already discussed with both the Ministry of Health and the Ministry of Economy, who assured us that there is no objection against this regulation, which was also positively commented by the Competition Council. We are confident that the decision of the members of the Parliament will be a favorable one for the project “, the president of APMGR also stated.
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