Tomasz Zaprutko
Public Health and Governance, Volume 11, Issue 1, 2013, pp. 35 - 43
https://doi.org/10.4467/20842627OZ.14.004.1614The evaluation of the patients economic availability to some groups of medicines. One year follow up of a new reimbursement system
Changes in the organization and financing of the public health care are always a reason of the social restlessness. The same situation was observed in Poland where at the beginning of 2012 a new reimbursement system was introduced. Therefore the main aim of this paper is to verify economic availability of patients to medicines after implementation of the changes. The annual research perspective ensures the reliability of analysis. The study concerns 11 medicines and was conducted using official announcements of the Polish Minister of Health. Due to changes introduced by the Polish government, prices of some drugs have been permanently reduced. But in some analyzed cases (olanzapine) reduction is not sufficient. Some medicines, like gosereline were significantly more expensive in 2012 than in 2011. Although the new reimbursement system has a lot of advantages, further studies and amendments are necessary to provide a real economic availability to many important medicines.