Factors Impacting Pharmaceutical Prices and Affordability: Narrative Review

Abstract

Increasing prescription drug pricing often reflects additional work stress on medical professionals because they function as financial advisors for patients and help them manage out-of-pocket expenses. Providers or prescribers wish to help patients with prescription costs but often lack related information. Healthcare plan providers try to display prescription and drug cost information on their websites, but such data may not be linked to electronic prescription software. A mark-up is defined as the additional charges and costs that are applied to the price of a product for the purpose of covering overhead costs, distribution charges, and profit. Therefore, the policies implemented in the pharmaceutical distribution chain might include the regulation of wholesale and retails mark-ups and pharmaceutical remuneration. If mark-ups are regulated, countries are highly recommended to use regressive mark-ups rather than fixed percentage mark-ups. This narrative review provides insights into the framework of pharmaceutical mark-up systems by describing different factors impacting pharmaceutical prices and affordability. These include the interplay of medicine pricing and the supply chain, the impact of pertinent laws and regulation and out-of-pocket expenditure.

The Effects of the National Centralized Drug Purchasing Pilot Program on Nucleos(t)ide Analogs in Shenzhen City: An Interrupted Time Series Analysis

“…According to the previous studies, in addition to price control, one of the most commonly used policies and strategies to improve medicine affordability and accessibility is the promotion of generic medicine use ( 60 ). Most of the Association of Southeast Asian Nations (ASEAN) countries, especially Malaysia and Indonesia, applied generic medicine promotion to enhance the use of generic medicines as they are much cheaper ( 61 ).…”

Critical Success Factors and Traceability Technologies for Establishing a Safe Pharmaceutical Supply Chain

“…Other costs include the higher price of healthcare [ 6 ] and health insurance [ 61 ], different rates of interest while purchasing medications [ 58 ], different currency rates, and high costs of developing a modern traceability technology to detect counterfeit drugs [ 4 , 8 , 44 ]. There is also an additional cost applied to the original price of the medicines to cover the overhead costs, logistics costs, plus a profit, usually referred to as a mark-up [ 62 ].…”

An Evaluation of the Reflective Constructs Influencing Community Pharmacists’ Decision-to-Procure from Pharmaceutical Suppliers: A Structural Equation Modeling Study

“…Community pharmacists are expected to maintain a practical balance between their commercial interests and the welfare of the patient [Hepler & Strand, 1990;. Therefore, procurement decisions should be guided by considerations such as cost, affordability, and business profitability [Mathews et al, 2020: Lee et al, 2021: Suh, 2011, service quality from suppliers [Njoki & Kimiti, 2018], and product quality [Njoki & Kimiti, 2018: Giralt et al, 2020, the type of product selected whether generic or substitutes or branded medicines [Seeley & Singh, 2021: Dedrick and Eckel, 1984: You et al, 2019: Perumal-Pillay and Suleman, 2020: Desai et al, 2019 and quantity of products requested. [Dubois et al, 2019].…”