Health Minister Alexandru Rafila on Tuesday advocated the need to develop the pharmaceutical industry in Romania by creating a more attractive economic environment for investors in the field, write Agerpres.

„I believe that if we manage to make the Romanian economic environment attractive for the development of the pharmaceutical industry, then we solve at least two problems. One that is directly related to the economic development of the country, improving or increasing budget revenues on the one hand and on the other hand I think we are also talking about increasing access to medicines for Romanian patients,” said Rafila at the opening of the conference „The new pharmaceutical strategy, innovation and access to European standard medicine in Romania”, organized by DC News Media Group.

Minister Rafila said that „important steps have been made” in terms of pricing policies.

„Important steps have been made in establishing the reference price for medicines, especially generic medicines, where the reference was often given by molecules that did not exist on the market and this led to a very low, artificial price and to the disappearance of many products. On the other hand, we have aligned the claw-back tax for generic drugs from domestic production and those from import and this was also appreciated by everyone and in addition – and this does not necessarily refer to genetic or innovative drugs – we have offered an indexation for affordable drugs that was normally linked to inflation between 7 and 14 percent depending on the price of each of these categories of drugs,” said Rafila.

Regarding access to innovative medicines, he said that the Ministry of Health is developing „formulas that can be applied”.

„We have to understand that only an acceleration of this process is still dependent on a budget that is allocated to these innovative medicines, which covers most of the budget for compensated and free medicines. Let’s not forget that almost 80% of the budget goes to innovative medicines which, of course, benefit patients with serious diseases, including cancer patients, but, in the same way, these patients must also benefit from access to generic medicines,” said the minister.

He called for „the creation of an innovation fund to allow better access to innovative medicines and effort-sharing between manufacturing companies and authorities”, while bearing in mind that „the vast majority of patients must continue to have access to generic medication”.