Medicines covered by Duterte’s price cap and their maximum prices

Malacañang on Monday released the maximum retail and wholesale prices covered by President Rodrigo Duterte's Executive Order No. 104.

The Department of Health (DOH) earlier said its price regulation proposal covered medicines for hypertension, diabetes, cardiovascular disease, chronic lung diseases, neonatal diseases and major cancers, high cost treatments for chronic renal disease, psoriasis, and rheumatoid arthritis.

Prices of selected medicines are expected to have a mean reduction of 56% from the prevailing market prices once the EO takes effect, the DOH said in September last year.

The EO said the following would be covered by the price cap:

• Drugs that address the health priorities of the general public especially those that account for the leading causes of morbidity and mortality;
• those that have the high price differentials/arbotrage compared to international prices;
• those that have limited competition in terms of lack of generic counterparts or lack of market access to these procucts; and
• those where the innovator product if the most expensive yet most prescribed and/or dispensed in the market.

—Virgil Lopez/BM/NB, GMA News