India Pushes To End Sale Of Branded Drugs

Here is a move certain to warm the hearts of brand-name drugmakers everywhere. The drug controller of India wants to prohibit medicines from being sold under brand names in a bid to accelerate the sale of lower-cost generics. In fact, states have been ordered to stop issuing licenses for the manufacture or sale of drugs under brand names, The Economic Times reports.

Under the plan, all drugmakers applying for a license to market or manufacture fixed dose combination drugs will have to submit the generic name and not the brand names. The move comes shortly after a parliamentary committee issued a report that also strongly opposed issuing licenses that use brand names, the paper writes.

"We want to gradually move towards a future where we will not issue any brand or trade names. We are going all out to push generic drugs solely for the benefit of the public," Drugs Controller GN Singh tells the paper. "We have sent the order to all state health secretaries asking them to instruct their drug licencing issuing authority to issue licences only on generic names and not on branded or trade names, which is the usual practice now. A branded drug can be 10 times more expensive than a generic variant."

The Indian government has, in fact, undertaken several steps to push generics in recent months. The health ministry has made it mandatory for all doctors in the public sector to prescribe generic drugs and not brands. Doctors have warned that strong action will be taken against doctors found prescribing brands, the paper writes.

And India is also opening Jan Aushadhi, a countrywide chain of medical stores, to make generic and other drugs available at a reasonable cost. This comes on the heels of a program announced earlier this year called "Free medicine for all through Public Health Facilities." The campaign is expected to begin next month (back story).

As noted previously, out-of-pocket spending recently reached 78 percent of total health expenditures, with drugs representing 72 percent of the total. And 22 percent of India's 1.17 billion population receives healthcare from the public sector, but this is expected to rise to 52 percent in 2017.