Recommendations towards fair medicines prices in Europe

07.07.2020

12 European and international organisations representing not-for-profit healthcare insurers, healthcare professionals, public interest organisations and trade unions have developed and endorsed recommendations to bring fair medicines prices in Europe.

As the European Commission is consulting on its forthcoming European Pharmaceutical Strategy and that the current crisis strained severely health systems and public budgets, signatories of this statement have come forward with suggestions on how the European Union could help bring more balance in pharmaceuticals price levels:

  • A radical rethinking of the way pharmaceutical markets and health systems operate in Europe is needed.
  • Transparency of medicines prices and their research and development, production, marketing and regulatory costs, as well as a methodology to calculate them, is needed.
  • The European Commission should include accessibility, affordability, transparency clauses in all forms of public funding and/or public-private partnership in pharmaceutical research.
  • The forthcoming EU Pharmaceutical Strategy must address the abuse of the current model of pharmaceutical incentives, which are particularly acute in the orphan and paediatrics regulations.
  • The European Commission should uphold strong scientific, regulatory standards to assess added therapeutic benefit

The full statement is available here.