To improve the affordability of medicines in the country, the government has extended price caps to an additional 39 drugs to treat diseases such as diabetes and digestive disorders, under price control. The new price control list includes more than 500 drugs. National Pharmaceutical Pricing Authority (NPPA) said that, “it has revised the prices in respect of 39 formulation packs”. It is notified that, the prices of formulations including Ciprofloxacin Hydrochloride, Cefotaxime, Paracetamol, Domperidone and Metformin+Glimepiride have been fixed.
The latest price control list will be including medicines of foreign drugmakers such as Abbott Laboratories and GlaxoSmithKline Plc and domestic firms such as Lupin, Cadila Healthcare and Ipca. Indian drugmakers have opposed the decision and said that drug prices are already the lowest in the world.
The government has capped prices of essential drugs based on the simple average of all medicines in a particular therapeutic segment with sales of more than 1 %, whereas, companies are allowed to hike prices by only up to 10% in a year. In May NPPA had extended the price cap of 30 formulation packs, including those used to treat diseases such as tuberculosis, diabetes and asthma.