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Original title: Second batch of cancer drugs comes with zero fees. Will drug prices go down?
Reporter | Xie Xin
On December 23, the State Council Customs Tariff Commission Office issued a notice stating that the most-favored-nation tax rate, the conventional tax rate, and the provisional tax rate for some imported goods will be adjusted in 2021.
Among them, in order to reduce the economic burden on patients and improve people’s quality of life, zero tariffs will be imposed on the second batch of anticancer drugs and drugs for rare diseases, and food needed for special patients; reduce artificial heart valves, hearing aids and other medical equipment, and whey protein. Import duties on raw materials such as milk powder and lactoferrin.
In 2018, the relevant departments issued a notice on adjusting the tariffs on the first batch of cancer drugs to zero tariffs. So what impact will zero tariffs on the second batch of cancer drugs and rare disease drugs have on national drug prices?
Checking the zero tariff list this time reveals that this zero tariff policy not only involves raw materials for cancer drugs and rare disease drugs, but also includes some imported preparation products. There are many known varieties of raw materials, including docetaxel, paclitaxel, gemcitabine, and other traditional chemotherapeutics, as well as lenalidomide, bortezomib, imatinib, dasatinib, niraparib, and other known varieties. There are also domestic cancer drugs such as Zebutinib, Ametinib, and Icotinib.
In drugs for rare diseases, there are pirfenidone, riluzole, and bosentan. Furthermore, the preparation products involved are basically well-known varieties in the cardiovascular and metabolic fields, such as the diabetes drug empagliflozin, acarbose, vildagliptin, linagliptin, recombinant human insulin and its salts, and the lipid-lowering drug in common use atorvastatin. calcium, in addition to the commonly used hepatitis B drug entecavir, human vaccines, and some blood products.
From the perspective of the scope of tariff adjustments, the most favored nation tariff rates for the products involved in 2021 are generally 9%, 6.5%, 6%, 4% and 3%. After adjustment, all tariffs become 0.
Considering that most of the products involved are raw materials and that the range of adjustment is not large, together with the costs of subsequent preparation and circulation, it can be difficult to realize the public’s expectations of a “significant price reduction” .
In fact, from the point of view of the cost composition of drug prices, except for some difficult special process formulations, be it biological drugs or traditional chemical drugs, generally the ratio of raw materials and production costs it is not high, and companies must share more. In addition, the cost of early-stage research and development and once-complicated national circulation linkages have also driven up drug prices.
However, with the implementation of the “two-bill system” in circulation, the normalization of national health insurance negotiations, and the implementation of policies such as centralized purchasing of drugs organized by the state, the prices of a considerable number of drugs Commonly used and anticancer drugs have fallen in recent years.
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Editor in charge: Xue Yongwei
