Price controls detrimental to pharma industry: Dr Reddy’s

Hyderabad: K Satish Reddy, Chairman, Dr Reddy’s Laboratories, on Thursday maintained that the recent decision of the central government to bring 108 additional pharmaceutical products under price control had raised serious doubts on policy implementation for the industry.

“A policy notification that adopted essentiality as the primary criteria for inclusion of medicines under price control and left room for extraordinary circumstances for bringing additional controls has clearly been overstepped in this case. Such decisions are detrimental to the health of the industry that seeks a balance between affordability and availability,” Reddy said, while speaking at the 30th Annual General Meeting (AGM) of the company here. He however felt that price controls would definitely bring a short-term solution to affordability of certain medicines to the public, ‘but in the long term it is not a sustainable solution’. The overall healthcare system and the role of pharmaceuticals in this space need to be revisited to get a clearer perspective, he added.

He also sought a collaborative approach from the regulatory regime. “If the objective is to make inexpensive medicines available to people, the answer cannot be in passing on the subsidy to pharma companies to bear the burden,” he added.

Stating that it was an exciting time to be in the pharmaceutical industry, he said the global spending on medicines would reach $1 trillion this year and $1.2 trillion by 2017, citing IMS data.

“Overall, generics’ spending is expected to increase from 27 per cent to 36 per cent in 2017. Key drivers behind this growth are the increasing access to medicine in the emerging markets and rise of biologics and specialty medicines,” he said.

He further said pharma prices would come under pressure in the US market due to increasing consolidation among pharma retail giants and distribution companies.