A report by Switzerland’s Federal Audit Office (SFAO) showing that most discounts on medicines are not passed on to insured patients, as required by law, has prompted an angry response from parliamentarians. Speaking to RTS on Thursday, Baptiste Hurni, a Socialist Party MP, described the practice as organised theft.
According to the SFAO report, published on Wednesday, pharmacists, hospitals and doctors’ surgeries retain part of the discounts they receive on the purchase price of medicines. These savings should, under Swiss law, be passed on to health insurers and policyholders.
The watchdog estimates that the pharmaceutical industry grants discounts worth CHF 743m a year. Only CHF 88m, or 12% of that amount, is passed on.
Thomas Bläsi, a Geneva MP for the Swiss People’s Party (UDC/SVP) and a pharmacist by profession, said, at this level, we can no longer speak of an administrative detail, he told RTS. The Federal Office of Public Health (FOPH), which is responsible for oversight, could not, he argued, announce increases in health-insurance premiums while saying at the same time that it was unable to establish where in the medicines supply chain all the financial discounts were going.
Mr Bläsi, who has previously submitted parliamentary motions on the issue, said the authorities now had to provide answers.
Baptiste Hurni, a Socialist member of the Council of States from Neuchâtel, was more scathing. He described the system as nothing less than organised theft.
The law is clear: discounts on medicine prices must go back to insurers and policyholders, said Mr Hurni, who is also president of the Swiss Federation of Patients. Today that is overwhelmingly not the case, thanks to some rather inventive accounting models, of the sort one sees in the criminal world.
Mr Bläsi said he hoped all political parties would take up the issue when parliament reconvenes in September. A recommendation from the Federal Audit Office is not an administrative formality but a call to act. We cannot afford this degree of opacity when people are struggling to pay their premiums every month, he said.
Another systemic weakness in the provision of medicine is the limited role of consumer price pressure. Because medicines are largely reimbursed by health insurance rather than paid for directly by patients, there is little incentive to seek out cheaper alternatives. But even if that market failure were addressed, the way medicines are sold would still need an overhaul to give consumers a meaningful choice of prices.
More on this:
RTS article (in French) – Take a 5 minute French test now
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