The federation is worried that the reform will make pharmacies in the regions less accessible.
The new reform has not been fully debated, according to the pensioners' association. If such a reform is adopted, the prices of reimbursable medicines will increase and expensive medicines needed by cardiovascular and oncology patients may become unavailable in Latvia, the society believes. The association is most concerned that pharmacies will become inaccessible in the regions, in small towns, as they often also act as doctor's practices.
Aija Barča, Chair of the Board of the Latvian Pensioners' Federation, said that Latvia should follow the example of neighboring countries:
"We are convinced that when thinking about reducing the prices of medicines, we should look both to the left and to the right. This is true for both Lithuania and Estonia, and we need to think about why they have such a VAT [on medicines]. And we still have 12%. I think that at the very least the Ministry of Finance should be involved here and we should start to do some useful calculations and reckoning about what is better - to keep the 12% VAT or to look and try to reduce it."
Barča also pointed out that if one looks into the publicly available information on the substance of the reform, one can conclude that the reduction in the prices of medicines is only at the expense of the regulation of the pricing policies of the distributors - the supply companies (wholesalers) and the pharmacies (retailers).
The price of medicines is determined by four actors in the pharmaceutical market: the manufacturer, the supplying company, the pharmacies and the State at a VAT rate of 12%. The pensioners' association wonders why neither the manufacturer nor the revised VAT rate on medicines is involved in reducing the price of medicines.
For this reason, the Latvian Pensioners' Federation does not currently support any government activity to regulate the pharmaceutical sector, because it sees a danger that the number of pharmacies in rural, suburban and small town areas, where a large proportion of Latvia's pensioners live, will decrease.
Meanwhile, the Ministry of Health is convinced that the new model will allow for a better review of how the manufacturer price, the pharmacy price and the wholesaler price are formed, as Latvia is currently one of the last countries in the EU in terms of the number of medicines and waiting times.
As previously reported, the Pharmacy Association is also opposed to such changes, as it believes that without adequate additional funding, many individual pharmacies will become unprofitable in the regions, thus depriving citizens of the opportunity to buy medicines closer to where they live.
