Several high-cost and critical-care medicines do not ordinarily reach retail pharmacies as they are supplied through hospital dispensaries, said Raghunath Reddy, president of the Karnataka Chemists and Druggists Association (KCDA). As a result, patients may have little idea of the actual price, he said. <\/p>\n
He also claimed that pharmaceutical companies may provide hospitals with additional rebates or incentives over and above the institutional discount, and called for greater scrutiny of hospital bills and procurement records.<\/p>\n
The margins available to wholesalers and retailers are comparatively limited, said Ravindra Bhusnur, vice-president of the Karnataka Pharma Retailers & Distributors Organisation. Wholesalers generally receive around 8-10% and retailers around 16-20%, while the larger benefit of institutional discounts can remain with the institution where the medicine is sold, he said. <\/p>\n
Many hospitals operate their own pharmacy counters, he added, stressing that the association has urged the government and the National Pharmaceutical Pricing Authority to bring down medicine prices.<\/p>\n
The three representatives supported extending price controls to high-value medicines. Medicines already covered by the Drug Price Control Order are sold within government-fixed ceilings, and bringing more high-value and high-volume medicines under similar regulation would benefit patients, Bhusnur said.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"Several high-cost and critical-care medicines do not ordinarily reach retail pharmacies as they are supplied through hospital dispensaries,…\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":871186,"comment_status":"","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[58],"tags":[97,243,253164,28712],"class_list":["post-871185","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","category-medication","tag-health","tag-medication","tag-medicine-prices","tag-pharmacists"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/871185","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=871185"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/871185\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/871186"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=871185"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=871185"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=871185"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}