Australians paying 14 times more for prescription drugs than other Commonwealth nations

Updated

A report has found that Australians pay at least 14 times more for prescription drugs than people in the UK, New Zealand and Canada.

The Grattan Institute report compared wholesale drug prices in Australia with those in the UK, New Zealand and Canada and concluded that Australians paid more than $1 billion too much for prescription drugs last year.

Grattan Institute health program director Stephen Duckett says even after price reductions on seven drugs were introduced yesterday, the prices are far higher than overseas.

"Atorvastatin for example, one of the highest use drugs in Australia, a cholesterol-lowering drug, dropped from $30 for a pack to $19 for a pack but in the United Kingdom that same pack is only the equivalent of $2.84 and in New Zealand it's only $2.01," he said.

"There's a cancer drug Anastrozole, where in Australia it's $92 for a pack of 30 one milligram tablets but in the UK it's only $3.30.

"So it's orders of magnitude difference."

David Polson was diagnosed as HIV positive 28 years ago and must now take a complex cocktail of drugs to survive.

He says the high price of medication is discouraging people from getting themselves tested for HIV and obtaining the appropriate treatment.

"We need to get the price of these drugs down so people get tested and if they are positive to take the medicine," he said.

"If the medicine is so prohibitively expensive, they're not going to do it."

Dr Duckett blames the price disclosure policy which was introduced in 2007.

Under the policy, pharmacies are forced to reveal discounts on drug prices that manufacturers provide them and the Government then reduces the amount paid to pharmacies for each drug.

Government urged to abolish red tape

But Dr Duckett says the Government has too much red tape to deal with.

"We think that the Government should be more proactive," he said.

"We think they should say 'look what are the other countries paying? We're not going to pay any more than that'."

He says there are too many vested interests involved.

"The drug companies sit on both sides of the table when the prices have come to be set," he said.

"There's a thing called the Pharmaceutical Benefits Pricing Authority and that has, as representatives, Medicines Australia and the Generic Medicine Industry Association as part of the membership and these are the same people who are supposed to be setting the prices for their members.

"I mean, it's just an amazing conflict of interest."

He says there needs to be an overhaul of the system and a new authority formed to manage the Pharmaceutical Benefits Scheme.

"We should have experts deciding what goes on the scheme and because they've got a fixed budget, they should be actually driving the prices down and using that money to actually put new drugs on the scheme," he said.

Dr Duckett says fixing the pricing arrangement would save the Government and taxpayers $1 billion.

Topics: pharmaceuticals, health, chemicals-and-pharmaceuticals, federal-government, australia

First posted