Expensive drugs burden the health insurance companies

Expensive drugs burden the health insurance companies.

(10.06.2010) Expensive special drugs cause high costs for the health insurance companies. Many drugs had little or no added benefit, according to the current "Barmer Report". Barmer GEK has presented the new Pharmaceutical Reports 2010. In it is u.a. reports that the sometimes very expensive drugs over-burden the budgets of health insurance, although many newly introduced drugs provide no additional benefit for patients. Barmer GEK puts the proportion of new drugs at 40 percent without additional benefit. The remedies are especially special drugs for cancer, rheumatism and multiple sclerosis. At the presentation of the report, health researcher Gerd Glaesk demanded that the new patented medicines should initially only be given a temporary approval and then re-tested for actual use later. So you want to contain unnecessary drugs without additional benefits and thus also the escalating costs.

For example, cancer drugs cause extremely high costs. The cost of a drug-cancer therapy costs around 60,000 euros per year, in some cases even up to 100,000 euros. These medicines would account for about one-fifth of the total health insurance spending of health insurers. The budgets of the health insurance companies would therefore be very heavily burdened, and partly with drugs whose additional benefits have not yet been proven. The rates of increase of the twenty most expensive remedies were between 12 and 25 percent at Barmer in the last year of 2009, with an average increase over the entire range of 6 percent.

Federal Health Minister Philipp Rösler is planning a so-called "pharmaceutical austerity package" to stop the steadily rising pharmaceutical prices. For example, discounts and frozen pharmaceutical prices are to be introduced. In addition, Rösler wants to force the pharmaceutical industry to negotiate with the health insurance companies for new medicines. If no agreement could be found within one year, an arbitration commission should determine the price. Rösler wants to save 2 billion euros in the long term by this measure.

Bamer vice-boss Rolf Schlenker welcomed the plans of the Minister of Health. So Schlenker asked: "Why do the pharmaceutical companies for the cancer medicine Glivec in the UK demand 1800 euros, but with us 2800 euros?" Schlenker also called for an arbitration commission, based on the drug prices of European foreign countries. Further sensible measures to reduce costs are a "price moratorium in hospitals" and a "moderate" reduction in total medical compensation. (Sb)

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