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The ceiling prices of 464 formulations (amounting to nearly 7,000 different stock keeping units) have been fixed by the National Pharmaceuticals Pricing Authority (NPPA) after the announcement of National List of Essential Medicines (NLEM), 2015 and Revised Schedule-I. This has resulted in effective savings to the consumers of the country Rs. 2,288 crore by way of reduced prices, according to a data by the Department of Pharmaceuticals (DoP).
The Union health ministry had revised the NLEM-2011 raising the number of medicines in the list from 348 medicines in the NLEM-2011 to 376 medicines in the revised NLEM-2015.
Earlier last year, the Central Drugs Standard Control Organization (CDSCO) had constituted a core committee under the chairmanship of Dr V M Katoch, former secretary of Department of Health Research (DHR) for reviewing and revising the NLEM-2011. The core committee submitted its report to the government on December 9, 2015 and after examination of the report, the government accepted the recommendations of the committee in toto and adopted the NLEM-2015. The government has further decided that the list will be operational with immediate effect.
Ever since, the NPPA has been revising the prices of medicines on a war footing.
Meanwhile, the DoP has refuted the reports, appeared in a section of the press, that the prices of 100 drugs may increase by 10 per cent as they are now out of NLEM.
Terming the news item as misleading and is not in tune with the factual position, the DoP clarified that based on the scientific criteria, core committee recommended inclusion of 106 medicines and deletion of 70 medicines from the earlier NLEM-2011. The Pharmaceutical Pricing Policy entails the price control of only Schedule-1 medicines which are included in the NLEM. The medicines, which ceased to be part of NLEM- 2015 and Schedule-1, will only be monitored as non-scheduled medicines. Non-scheduled medicines are allowed an increase of upto 10% in the prices every year, which is monitored by the NPPA.
In the detailed analysis of the number of medicines deleted and added in the Schedule-1, therapeutic category-wise in the revised NLEM-2015 shows that there are sufficient number of medicines in each of the categories. These scheduled medicines represent a wide range of medicines for different therapeutic groups and will help in promoting medicines with better efficiency and favourable safety profiles, which are now under price control due to their inclusion in NLEM, which is in the public interest.
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