Cabinet rejects DRAP summary on price fixation of 35 essential drugs

ISLAMABAD: The federal cabinet has returned a summary seeking approval for fixing the prices of 35 new medicines on the essential medicines list, along with a proposed increase in the price of a critical drug currently unavailable in the market, officials confirmed on Friday.

Senior officials in the Ministry of National Health Services, Regulations and Coordination, and the Drug Regulatory Authority of Pakistan (DRAP) said the summary had been forwarded to the federal cabinet for approval, but it was not endorsed.

The decision leaves pending the registration and pricing of dozens of new essential medicines, as well as that of a vital drug that pharmaceutical firms have stopped producing due to high production costs.

According to officials, while non-essential medicines are priced by pharmaceutical companies under the deregulation policy while the fixation of essential medicines’ prices and the pricing of new molecules remains under government control, with final approval resting with the federal cabinet.

They said that the prime minister had already tasked DRAP with reviewing the prices of medicines in 190 categories of the non-essential list through a third party. This directive came in response to widespread complaints of “unprecedented” price hikes by pharmaceutical companies, which have further burdened patients across the country.

The pharmaceutical industry, however, termed the cabinet’s decision to return the summary “unfortunate” and warned that delays in price fixation would aggravate patient suffering. Tauqeerul Haq, Chairman of the Pakistan Pharmaceutical Manufacturers Association (PPMA), said the returned summary pertained only to the registration and price fixation of essential medicines, which require cabinet approval. He said, “The cabinet disapproved the price fixation of 35 new essential medicines despite the fact that they had already been reviewed and cleared through the proper regulatory process.”