Control drug prices by ending hospitals' monopoly
Re: "Government to control medicine prices in coming months to rein in healthcare costs", National, May 16.
A decade ago the Public Health Ministry announced with great fanfare an initiative to oblige hospitals to give patients the option of either buying drugs from the hospital pharmacy or receiving a prescription that they could fill at the pharmacy of their choice. This is a system that works very effectively in the UK and other countries.
That initiative inevitably met with determined opposition from private hospitals, which lobbied the ministry until it dropped the idea, using the excuse that external pharmacies were not yet ready. Surely the ministry has now had enough time to prepare pharmacies to implement this sensible scheme that would greatly benefit the public and Thailand’s medical-tourism industry? This scheme would make the government’s job much easier, since it would then only have to regulate the price of restricted drugs available to hospitals and exotic drugs that are not stocked by separate pharmacies. The vast majority of drugs dispensed by hospitals are freely available in most outside pharmacies, but hospitals still get away with charging up to five times as much for them.
George Morgan
