The Minister of Health makes a very important last-minute announcement, and he talks to all Romanians about one of the most serious problems that millions of people are currently facing, and this is because he brings to attention the problem of the lack of medicines in many pharmacies in the country .
The Minister of Health explains below why this lack of medicines from pharmacies in Romania is a difficult problem to solve, but also why problems of this kind appear in Romania, while in other European countries they do not exist, or at least they do not have the same magnitude as the one registered in Romania.
"Crises of medical care do not appear out of the blue, because they are also a commodity, and it must respect some economic principles to exist on the market. There must be a correlation between the price of this commodity and the interest in producing and distributing that commodity. Romania, unfortunately, has a harmful system, for sure this system is old, it is more than 10 years old, for calculating the price of medicines.
It is said that in Romania, and this is how it has always been calculated, the lowest price among the costs in 12 European countries, or the price that refers to a certain product that enters the market at a certain time. What did we find? I found that the reference product often does not exist, sometimes without authorization to put it on the market, or this reference price compared to the basket of 12 countries, is so low that the producers are not stimulated.
Let's not forget an extremely important thing about these drugs, many of the manufacturers of generic drugs are factories in Romania. There are 20 factories in Romania that make such medicines, and here there should be a double policy, one that supports, or there should be a mechanism by which the medicines are kept on the market.
Another component should refer to the support of these producers who have, I think 1% - 1.5% of Romania's GDP is given by these producers of generic medicines, which are in many cities of the country. We at the ministry have only one entity, it is Antibiotice Iasi, but the rest are completely private.
The important thing is that they are drug factories, and having them is an important thing. Unlike, which has this price policy, countries like Hungary or Poland have three times more variants, varieties, of generic drugs, because with generics you usually have several manufacturers that make the same drug. It is clear that we did not have a policy to encourage the drugs to remain on the market."
