Cost of drugs
Senator Burke highlights major disparities and increases in State drug costs, seeking action to reduce pharmaceutical expenditure.
I raise the issue of the cost of drugs in the health service. It follows on from a detailed report from Susan Mitchell in The Sunday Business Post this week which indicated that in some cases we are now paying 24 times more than what the same drug costs in the United Kingdom. One drug, which is prescribed for patients with a psychiatric complaint, costs the equivalent of €50 per treatment in the United Kingdom for 12 months whereas here it costs €1,200. The cost of drugs has increased from €572 million a year in 2000 to €1.894 billion in 2010. That is a 230% increase over a ten year period. The Minister has negotiated down the price by €400 million over a three year period, but my understanding is that when we are replacing generic drugs with branded products, the generic drugs would be cheaper, and certainly sold at a competitive price. We now find that in some cases we are still paying up to 24 times more than what is being paid in the United Kingdom, while in other cases it is ten or 11 times more than what is paid in the United Kingdom. I ask the Leader to invite the Minister to the House to give an explanation for that. If we are transferring to generic drugs, at the very least we should not pay any more than what is being paid in the United Kingdom.
The leader of the Labour Party group, Senator Bacik, raised the matter of the need for legislation on the surrogacy issue. We are now allowing the Judiciary to become the legislators because we are not reacting fast enough to issues. Two weeks ago I published the draft Bill on missing persons. I ask that the Leader communicate with the Department and the Minister for Justice and Equality to determine whether we could start the process of debating that Bill in this House rather than waiting on the Department to produce one. A detailed Law Reform Commission report running to 160 pages has been published. The evidence is there. We should not park that report while we wait for a Department to produce a Bill. The Bill was drafted and is published, and we should get on with debating it. If the Department wants to amend it, it can do so but we should not park it for three or four years.
