The medicines situation in Chile: A critical appraisal from the academy

Abstract

Chile is an upper middle income country which health conditions have improved considerably over the last decades. It has a dual health system of both public and private health insurance and service provision, stratified by income and risk.Since 2000, Chile began a reform of the health system with the National Explicit Health Guarantee Regime as the core of the reform. It aims to be a comprehensive system of legally enforceable rights to receive quality healthcare with maximum waiting times, limited co-payments for priority health conditions. These health guarantees approach to providing universal and equitable coverage for quality healthcare in the dual health system.The pharmaceutical market is served today by local laboratories. The private channel distribution is concentrated in three pharmacy chains which have almost 1,200 shops all along the country. Chile holds the third place in Latin America where the biggest amount of medicines per inhabitant is sold.In 2013, a new legislation (Pharmaceutical's Law) was approved. Its main purpose was to encourage greater competition and transparency in the pharmaceutical market.The pharmaceutical commercial practices were useful to give medicines a relevance that normally did not have. However, the generation of alternatives proposals that allows the analysis of medicines under a different vision is necessary.