Medicines: pharmaceutical industry leaders want price increases
The main French pharmaceutical companies demanded on Tuesday that the drug price increases are subject to dedicated financing, excluding social security, to guarantee their production in France.
The G5 Health which brings together the leaders of Guerbet, Ipsen, LFB, Pierre Fabre, SanofiServier, Théa and bioMérieux recommend “for 2025 a dedicated budgetary envelope in the form of a sovereignty fund”. The G5 calls for the application of a provision of the financing law of social security taken in 2022 which, according to him, allows “price increases on essential medicines” and is supposed to “thus limit the risks of shortages”.
The provision makes it possible to take into account the location of production sites in order to promote French manufacturing in the price of a medicine and secure supply. It applies to new drugs, but the G5 wants to upgrade other existing products.
“Moratorium on price cuts”
The G5 Health thus warns in a press release “on the need to accentuate industrial policy in favor of products manufactured in France to restore health and industrial sovereignty”. He thus calls for “a moratorium on price reductions for essential medicines manufactured in France”.
The law allows an interministerial body to make price reductions each year to contain public health spending. It is up to him to identify therapeutic classes which may be affected by price reductions and to find an agreement with the companies concerned.
This same body can also grant price increases on a case-by-case basis, at the request of pharmaceutical companies, when there is a significant risk in the production and marketing of a drug. The company must justify higher production costs and most of the applications submitted are rejected or given very modest revaluation amounts.
