The new joint ministerial decision signed by Health Minister, Adonis Georgiadis, and the Deputy Minister of Finance, Athanasios Petralias, includes the strengthening of the pharmaceutical expenditure with an additional amount of 300 million euros.
The Health Minister announced that the strengthening of pharmaceutical spending aims to reduce the clawback amounts paid by pharmaceutical companies.
The distribution of the amount of 300 million euros is as follows:
- 80 million euros for the pharmaceutical expenditure (community pharmacies) EOPYY.
- 100 million euros for the pharmaceutical expenditure of high cost medicine of the EOPYY pharmacies.
- 120 million euros for the hospital pharmaceutical expenditure of the national health system hospitals.
However, the ministry’s financial “injection” is a “drop in the ocean” according to the representatives of the market. Recently the Association of Pharmaceutical Enterprises of Greece (SFEE) reported that the total pharmaceutical expenditure is estimated to reach 7.1 billion euros in 2023, while the participation of the state is only 2.8 billion euros. This means that the market in the last 11 years (since 2012 when pharmaceutical expenditure was 4.3 billion euros and state participation 3.6 billion euros) increased by 65%, while public funding decreased by 22%.
