Cost of foreign cancer drugs to be halved in Chinese public insurance pilot scheme
Five expensive trademarked drugs from overseas, used to treat diseases including cancer, could soon be covered by public insurance on the mainland.
The development follows a public outcry over a case in which leukaemia patients were unable to afford potentially life-saving medicine.
Li Bin, minister of the National Health and Family Planning Commission, said negotiations on bringing down the cost of five trademarked drugs had reached a “breakthrough”.
“These drugs are expensive. After negotiation the price drop was very significant and in general could cut more than 50 per cent of the price,” Li told reporters on the sidelines of the National People’s Congress.
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Ma Xiaowei, deputy minister of the commission, said it would include the five drugs in the public insurance catalogue. The catalogue denotes what drugs are eligible to be covered by public insurance payments. Including the five drugs in the catalogue means that patients deemed in need of the drugs by their doctors would pay a smaller proportion of the costs.
He said the commission was also considering how to fast track the importation of drugs used to treat 20 kinds of critical illnesses.
“We are trying our utmost to solve the problem of unaffordable and unattainable drugs and to achieve an important breakthrough by 2020,” Ma said.
Li did not identify the five drugs. However, his announcement comes a year after Hunan (湖南) authorities dropped a high-profile lawsuit against Lu Yong, a leukaemia patient who helped more than 1,000 fellow sufferers buy a cheap generic cancer drug from India.
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The patients, suffering from chronic myeloid leukaemia, had been struggling to afford Glivec, a Swiss-made drug that would have cost them more than 23,500 yuan (HK$28,000) a month. Lu turned them to Indian-produced generic alternatives not registered in China that were therefore considered counterfeit under the law.
Lu’s arrest in Yuanjiang, Hunan, caught the media spotlight when his fellow patients came to his defence, saying they could not afford Glivec and without Lu’s help would have been waiting to die.
Public health experts were quoted in reports as saying the authority should help those who could not afford the drugs.
Meanwhile, Li said 13 provinces and cities had amended local family planning laws and by March would be allowing all couples to have two children, in accordance with the national two-child policy.
The commission estimates the policy will increase the labour force by 30 million by 2050.
Ma urged mainland women to stay in the country to seek help with assisted reproductive techniques rather than go abroad for such services. He said 432 institutes across the country were authorised to carry out the procedures and had experience in 700,000 cases.
