The EUR 0.75 co-payment for every prescription in place as of the 1st of January 2025 is not a good solution, says Vice-Dean of Riga Stradins University’s Public health and Social Welfare Faculty, Deputy Director of Public Health Institute and former Director of the Latvia’s State Agency of Prices of Medicines Daiga Behmane.
The prescription fee was set to help compensate the reduction of the medicine markup for pharmacies. However, as LETA was told by Behmane in an interview, this has created a bureaucratic system in which numerous officials of the National Health Service will be able to “micromanage” each and every prescription in every pharmacy in order to “manage euro cents”.
According to Behmane, it would have been a much better and more effective solution to maintain the previous markup employed by pharmacies,
without lowering it. This would have helped avoid the adoption of a prescription maintenance fee, which is a major bureaucratic burden on the side of the state. For patients, on the other hand, it has caused a great deal of confusion. The medicines markup permitted for pharmacies should be on the level that allows pharmacies to survive. The existing markup does not provide this. This is why there is a clumsy solution with the prescription fee, says Behmane.
At the same time, the expert admits the reduction of the markup allowed by wholesellers was absolutely correct, because in Latvia it is on average higher than in the European Union. In addition, until now, the fact that the markup of wholesalers for medicines was set as a percentage, and not in absolute numbers, has led to huge prices for the most expensive medicines.
From the 1st of January 2025, the reform of the price of medicines developed by the Ministry of Health came into force. This reform is intended to lower the price of medicines. To achieve this, the permitted price of medicines for both wholesalers and pharmacies has been reduced. According to estimates of the Ministry of Health, medicine prices should go down by an average of 15%.