MANY medicines subject to a national mandatory price cut had been gradually disappearing from shelves in Shenzhen, according to an investigation by Shenzhen Special Zone Daily.
The National Development and Reform Commission (NDRC) lowered the retail prices of 162 medicines March 28, the 27th price adjustment, to relieve financial burdens on patients.
A resident, identified only as Lin, told the paper he visited several drug stores but was unable to buy a blood pressure medication he needed every day.
The medicine Lin wanted was produced by a Guangdong pharmaceutical factory and was selling for 10.2 yuan (US$1.56) instead of 12.35 yuan after the price adjustment.
I did not expect supplies would run out so quickly, said Lin.
Low-priced antibiotics were also disappearing from local drug stores, the paper said.
We stopped purchasing norfloxacin which was selling for between three and four yuan after the price reduction. Instead, we are selling norfloxacin produced by another four producers, which all sell for over eight yuan, said a salesman at a drug store on Jingtian South No.7 Street.
An unidentified man in charge of a big drug store said it had become common in the industry to remove medicines subject to price control from the shelves.
More than 20 percent of the medicines subject to price reduction would not be found in local drug stores, the man said.
The paper quoted another man in a local chain drug store as saying drug stores don t receive the government subsidies given to hospitals and community medical centers, so we will stop buying the medicines because there is little profit.
There were about 10,000 pharmaceutical factories in China, producing many alternatives of the same medicine, the paper said.
Pharmaceutical companies complained that mandatory price reductions would force them to stop producing cheap medicines.
Meanwhile, price reductions would probably affect the quality of medicines, some said.
The retail prices have been reduced 27 times, but people are still shouldering a heavy economic burden for health care. A price reduction is not an efficient solution, said Yu Jian, vice chairwoman of the Shenzhen retail enterprises association.
Yu said public hospitals, which sell more than 80 percent of medicines, were all profit-motivated. This was the core cause of the cost burden, she said. <2001>(Li Hao)
