3 | 12/30/2020 – 8:17 AM (GMT-4)
Cuban government announces it will subsidize medicines for those who cannot cope with the news drug prices, which will rise starting January 1, as part of the monetary unification process.
“If even with the increase in salary and increase in costs, someone can not pay for a short treatment, he will be treated through Social Assistance,” said the head of the Commission for the implementation of the guidelines, Marino Murillo Jorge.
The increase in the prices of the requested products, such as antibiotics and analgesics, which will no longer be subsidized, is a problem that worries the population very much.
The salary increase, projected 4.9 times, will be less than the increase in the price that 54 percent of medicines will suffer.
Resolution 345 of the Ministry of Finance and Prices, published in the Official Gazette number 71, reveals that drugs such as amoxicillin, which can cost up to 33.70 pesos, while dipiron, which in 2018 is worth 3.50 pesos, will now cost 13 times more, exactly 47.80 pesos.
In the middle of a serious and prolonged deficiencies in the pharmacy network, it was announced that the basic table of medicines, consisting of 757 medicines in 2019, will be reduced from 2021 to 619 products.
According to Emilio Delgado Iznaga, director of medicines and medical technology of the Ministry of Public Health (MINSAP), the cause is “the financial tensions we faced, the recurrence of the blockade and the situation generated by COVID-19 was affected, reduced coverage.”
Among the drugs that will not continue to be produced are naproxen (anti-inflammatory) and sulfasalazine, used in digestive disorders and patients with ulcerative colitis.
The state will keep subsidized the prices of drugs associated with chronic diseases with permanent treatments – those that are sold through the well-known card -; those that are used for long periods of time in patients with neurological and psychiatric disorders, as well as natural and traditional medicine products, and optics.
Earlier, the government announced that it planned to allocate 7 billion pesos for drug subsidies in 2021. The figure is a minimum of 30 billion to cover subsidies in general in the country. Of this budget, more than half (17.878 million) will be the subsidy of the electricity tariff.
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