Cheap medicines, the cost of which has been kept low for years thanks to government price regulations, are increasingly hard to find in China's drug stores and hospitals, the Beijing Youth Daily quoted a seasoned doctor as saying on Monday.
For example, cedilanid, a medicine used for the treatment of arrhythmia and congestive heart failure which is officially priced at 3 yuan ($0.44) for a dose, has totally vanished from many hospitals, news portal cngold.com.cn reported Monday.
In recent years, dozens of cheap medicines, even life-saving ones, have vanished gradually. But on the black market, these medicines are sold for hundreds of times their official prices.
Although the government has tried to ease the shortage of officially-designated cheap medicines, including raising prices to stimulate production, it has failed to solve the problem and providing access to these medicines remains an urgent task.
Cost control
Cheap medicines, also known as "basic medicines," are medicines which meet basic therapeutic requirements and should be affordable for everyone.
A staffer from a hospital's drug store told the Beijing Youth Daily that these medicines are usually sold out because pharmaceutical factories have either halt or cut production. For example, no factory in China is now making lidocaine hydrochloride, a medicine used to combat arrhythmia that should be available for 0.96 yuan a dose.
Yu Mingde, chairman of the Chinese Pharmaceutical Enterprises Association, said that dozens of cheap medicines disappear annually. An official from the National Health and Family Planning Commission (NHFPC) once told the media that supply of cheap medicines not being able to meet demand is a long-running problem.
Insiders pointed out that due to the price controls, many factories have stopped producing these medicines as the profits on offer are tiny. Besides, when companies bid to produce these medicines, some small enterprises lower their estimated prices to an unrealistic level, which means that it is impossible for them to both sell the medicines at that price and cover their costs.
Moreover, doctors are reluctant to prescribe cheap medicines either, because of the low profits for themselves.
Black market
However, these scarce cheap medicines have been sold for extremely high prices in the black market. According to the Xinhua News Agency, Adrenocorticotropine for Injection (ACTH), which is used for treating rare infantile spasms and is priced 7.8 yuan a box, can go for more than 4,000 yuan on the black market.
A drug distributor told Xinhua that he can only earn 2 percent profit from a box of ACTH.
As demand is small, many factories are not willing to produce the medicine and distributors are accordingly not willing to stock it.
A sales manager from Shanghai Pharmaceuticals Holding said that as the country's second largest medicine distributor, they only keep 2 cases of ACTH - around 200 boxes - in stock.
However, they usually have thousands of cases of other medicines at hand.
According to the Xinhua report, the medicines on the black market usually come from drug companies and hospitals. Insiders revealed that scalpers usually work with drug companies' employees or medical staff.
Small changes
In 2014 the National Development and Reform Commission raised the price ceiling for 280 basic Western medicines and 250 basic traditional Chinese drugs, stipulating that manufacturers could set prices themselves as long as that the daily cost for Western medicines did not exceed 3 yuan while the daily cost for traditional Chinese medicines does not exceed 5 yuan.
Moreover, the NHFPC released a statement in April which requires specific factories and hospitals to produce and use nine specific cheap medicines.
However, many insiders have noted that raising prices will only mobilize medicine enterprises to a certain extent.
However, if drug dealers are not willing to distribute the medicines, while drug stores do not want to purchase the products and doctors also refuse to prescribe the medicines, patients still will get cheap medicines.
Some experts have called for the establishment of a national cheap medicine database.
Lin Shaobin, deputy president of Fuzhou Second Hospital in East China's Fujian Province, told the Science and Technology Daily enterprises that manufacture cheap medicines should benefit from preferential policies such as easier access to credit, tax relief and government subsidies.
