Millions of people are suffering from the unbearably high cost of healthcare— including highly expensive drugs under a variety of brand names and often non-essential tests and unregulated charges at private hospitals. They will welcome President Mahinda Rajapaksa’s declaration last Friday that brave new steps will be taken soon to implement the long delayed essential medicine concept of the revered Prof. Senaka Bibile.
The President made the announcement at the opening of a new medical complex at the Colombo National Hospital in Colombo and his assurance of a brave new move which hopefully means that the National Medicinal Drugs Policy based on the Bibile Policy will be introduced in Parliament and effectively implemented without being diluted or undermined by vested interests including transnational drug companies.
In 2005 the Cabinet approved a comprehensive draft for an NMDP under which quality drugs could be made available to all people at affordable prices. The draft had been submitted to the then Health Minister Nimal Siripala de Silva in July 2005 by Professor Krishantha Weerasuriya -- the World Health Organisation’s Drug Policy Advisor for South Asia -- after several rounds of discussions with all stakeholders including patients rights groups. Since then Minister de Silva and the present Health Minister Mithripala Sirisena have repeatedly promised that legislation for the NMDP will be introduced soon but that ‘soon’ has gone on for more than eight years.
The People’s Movement for the Rights of Patients (PMRP) in 2009 filed a fundamental rights petition in the Supreme Court claiming that the delay in implementing the NMDP was denying the people their fundamental right to good healthcare and to obtain quality drugs at affordable prices. But for more than four years the Attorney General representing the government has, like the Health Ministers, promised the Supreme Court that the legislation would be introduced soon but that soon has not yet come though the case has gone on for more than four years.
We hope that President Rajapaksa has now decided that enough is enough and that the NMDP must be introduced immediately and implemented effectively to restore a health service where the wellbeing of the patients is given top priority.
At present, health experts believe that up to 15,000 medicinal drugs have been registered for import but no one knows how many are being imported and there is chaos in the drug market. Some drugs are imported under their generic names while thousands of non-essential drugs are imported under highly expensive brand names.
To add to the dangerous mess thousands of varieties of counterfeit or substandard drugs are brought in by baggage carriers who are hired by racketeers to bring in these counterfeit drugs from cottage industries in India or Pakistan. With little or no quality control and many pharmacies known to be buying counterfeit drugs from the racketeers, a patient may be paying up to Rs.100 for an anti-biotic which contains wheat flour so the patient takes wheat flour for one or two weeks and wonders what the devil is going on because his condition has got worse in addition to an upset stomach from the wheat flour antibiotics.
