OREANDA-NEWS. April 19, 2012.The cost of medicines for Ukrainians can be reduced from 20% to 2 times. This was stressed by the Prime Minister of Ukraine Mykola Azarov opening a Cabinet meeting.

Prime Minister recalled that the President of Ukraine Viktor Yanukovych has set the Government a number of tasks on execution of social initiatives that will allow not only to raise the welfare of our citizens, but also to reach a new, European level of social policy. One of these tasks, as Prime Minister underlined, is the availability and quality of treatment in what of primary importance are accessibility and quality of medicines.

"For this purpose we begin preparations for the implementation of the European practice of partial compensation for the cost of medicines (primarily "social") and the introduction of referential one (i.e., reasonable, fair) prices to drugs. As a result, cost of medicines for the population would decrease from 20% to 2 times," stressed Mykola Azarov and added that citizens of Ukraine are spending on drugs for more than 20 billion UAH annually.

Mykola Azarov is convinced that significantly reduce the cost of drugs is possible, having revived the domestic pharmaceutical industry, and introducing appropriate practices of work of distributors and pharmacies. "The lion's share - 70% of the market in value terms - at us, unfortunately, makes imports. Therefore, we will increase domestic production of drugs, to revive shattered in the previous years domestic pharmaceuticals - and thereby to reduce the price of medicine," he declared.

Prime Minister has given an example of realizations of an amplodymin that urgently required for hypertensive patients. He said this drug in sufficient quantity is produced by domestic industry, but well as imported to Ukraine under more than a dozen other names: "The name another - and already the price in 5-6, sometimes 10 times higher."

Over-valuation occurs through the chains of intermediaries, and this problem will be eliminated by the practice of proper distribution when between the manufacturer and the pharmacy there is a maximum one wholesale broker.