Roche official: the activity of the pharma market in Romania is difficult to plan
The long term planning of the activity in the area of pharma in the business environment is difficult due to the way of taxation of drugs, stated Martine Draulette, the manager of the pharma division of the Roche group for Business Magazin.
‘We have no predictability especially in the domain of health where I don’t see any long term strategy with a coherent plan of investment, so that it is very complicated for a company to operate in these conditions: we had some ministers of health only in the last months. It is very difficult to take good decisions, intelligent ones if you don’t plan your activities on a long term. As a result, I can state that the local pharma market is not possible to have sustainable business due to the way of taxation of the drugs’ stated Martine Draulette quoted by Business Magazin.
The way of taxation which makes it difficult to have sustainability of a business in the pharma domain includes the annual reduction of drugs prices and the clawback tax application. This tax means that the drugs producers contribute to the financing of the health public system with a percentage of sales and represents between 5 and 11 % of the income made by the pharma companies through sale of products. The tax can reach to the end of 2017 over 20% Draulette considers.
The problem of industry is not connected to low prices, but to the clawback tax, added to the lowest prices in Europe, considers the manager of the pharma division Roche. ‘ When it comes to drugs with tradition on the market, prices are already low and in Romania they are the lowest, so that if you apply the clawback tax to these prices extremely low, for some of them the price will become lower than the production price and this is not sustainable’ Martine Draulette said.