Centre likely to slash prices of critical drugs: Report

The Centre is planning to reduce prices of drugs used for the treatment of diabetes, cardiovascular diseases, and chronic kidney diseases by fixing trade margins. A source told News18 that an announcement is expected soon.

The trade margin would be rationalised in a phased manner so that the industry gets ample time to accommodate these changes. The difference between the price to trade for manufacturers and the price to patients as the maximum retail price (MRP) is called a trade margin.

“For instance, we first slashed the margins in the anti-cancer category. Similarly, this time, we will announce the slashing of the trade margins of a particular category of drugs such as anti-diabetic or for kidney diseases,” the source told News18.

Drug price watchdog National Pharmaceutical Pricing Authority (NPPA) has been working on the plan for a few months.

Earlier, the NPPA had put a cap on the trade margins of 42 non-scheduled anti-cancer medicines. The government had said that the move resulted in the reduction of up to 90 per cent of the MRP of 526 brands of those medicines.