One of the Government’s projects is to advance the deregulation of different markets and decided to move forward the medicines sector. This was announced by the Minister of Deregulation and Transformation of the State, Federico Sturzeneggerwho said through his social network account
“In the next few hours, the governor of Mendoza, Alfredo Cornejo, will receive from Mario Lugones, Minister of Health, which will revolutionize the medicine market in Argentina. The letter will confirm that Medicines Law 16,463 establishes provincial jurisdiction for the import, use and marketing of medicines in each province,” the tweet says.
He explained that Cornejo “are planning to buy medicines from India, which I estimate will generate an abrupt drop in the costs of medications in your province.” Sturzenegger pointed out that, “due to the high cost of medications, adherence to treatments in Argentina is only 30%” and said that this happens “in the only country in the world where thousands of doses expire unused in their boxes.”
A question of costs
The minister stated that, Since 2016, the cost of medicines has doubled in Argentina and assured that “reducing the price of medicines is an obvious objective of the Ministry of Deregulation.”
In his tweet, Sturzenegger described as “the heroes of the day” to Cornejo and Lugones and also to Mario Russo, the Minister of Health who has just left his position, of whom he said that “he had been working along the same lines.”
Likewise, he hoped that the rest of the governors would later join the Mendoza initiative. “Anyone who doesn’t do it is because they don’t want to,” he emphasized in the closing of his post, which he finished with the famous libertarian acronym “VVL” (Long live Libertad Carajo).
The announcement of Sturzenegger was also confirmed by the presidential spokesperson, Manuel Adorni, who stated that “the decision made by the different provinces is up to each governor” and stated that “what happened with this note is to ratify the interpretation that they could import medicines.”
The deregulation of medicines raises alarms in the industry
The Government maintains that this step will help to bring down drug prices abruptly.. However, there are two issues to take into account in this sense and that raise alerts in the industry and also in users and they are: on the one hand, the doubts about the quality of medicines that will enter and the controls that will be carried out in this regard and, on the other, the fact of what will happen to local production of remedies.
“It is criminal that the provinces can import medicines without control of the National Administration of Medicines, Food and Medical Technology (ANMAT). They have no structure to make their own controls. They are going to put the health of the population at serious risk,” warns a source from the laboratories to Ámbito.
And he points out, on the other hand, that it is unfair competition the fact that “national laboratories have to wait years for the ANMAT to approve their registrations in order to sell and foreigners can bring in uncontrolled products.”
Source: Ambito
