Photographer: Mikael Sjoberg / Bloomberg
Photographer: Mikael Sjoberg / Bloomberg
Drugstores AstraZeneca Plc e GlaxoSmithKline Plc for BeiGene Ltd. agreed to reduce the prices of some of its most recent innovative medicines in China by an average of 50.6% in order to be covered by the country’s national insurance fund.
A total of 119 new therapies – treating everything from lung disease and diabetes to cancer and lupus – have been added for coverage by the state medical safety net after lengthy negotiations, the National Health care The Security Administration said in a notice posted on its website Monday.
The average price cut is 10 percentage points less than Last year, a relief for domestic and foreign drug makers, who saw their profits eroded by Beijing pressure to cut healthcare costs. Companies are eager to put their treatments on the list, even at huge discounts, in order to gain access to China’s pharmaceutical market, the second largest in the world.
China strives to have the best and cheapest in the world Health care
Patients in China would only need to pay a small fraction of the cost of these drugs out of their own pocket, since most of the bill will be paid by China’s 2.44 trillion yuan ($ 373 billion) national health insurance fund, covering more than 95% of the country’s 1.4 billion inhabitants. The list is updated annually with new entries since 2017, when Beijing stepped up its campaign to bring the best medicines to its growing middle class as quickly and cheaply as possible.
In total, Chinese patients can now use state insurance to pay for 2,800 drugs. Beijing has also managed to cut prices by more than 40%, on average, to 14 drugs, whose annual sales exceed 1 billion yuan each. The new version of the drug reimbursement list will take effect from March 1.
Medicines that made the most recent list include AstraZeneca’s cancer therapy, Zoladex. Brukinsa, China’s first cancer drug to receive approval from the Food and Drug Administration, developed by Beijing’s BeiGene, is also on the list.
Glaxo’s Benlysta and Volibris drugs, which treat lupus and pulmonary hypertension, respectively, made the list. Other first-line therapies by multinationals were a diabetes drug for Novo Nordisk S / A, a medication for chronic obstructive pulmonary disease developed by Astra, and a therapy for ulcerative colitis by Takeda Pharmaceutical Co.
The latest additions feature popular therapies for immune cancer known as PD-1 inhibitors, cancer treatments that use the body’s immune system to fight tumors – a priority for Beijing, as China has about 4 million new patients with cancer annually. These treatments included those developed by Chinese companies BeiGene, Jiangsu Hengrui Medicine Co. and Shanghai Junshi Biosciences Co.
The list also highlights treatments for Covid-19, such as ribavirin and arbidol antivirals, although China largely contained the outbreaks after the outbreak a year ago in Wuhan was controlled.
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It is not known to what extent companies have committed to individual therapies. The National Health care In the past, the Security Administration has reached agreements with some drug manufacturers to hide the details of price cuts.
For foreign pharmaceutical companies, competition in China has brought significant sacrifices. New drugs are often brought to the Chinese market at lower prices than those sold in the West, but still face competition from a growing legion of Chinese biotechnology companies that develop similar drugs that can be sold more cheap.
The older drugs from global pharmaceutical companies that lost patents are also facing price cuts. In a separate national campaign in which Chinese public hospitals buy generic drugs in bulk, prices have dropped by up to 90%.
– With the help of John Liu, Claire Che and Dong Lyu