The impact of pharmaceutical policy measures: an endogenous structural-break approach

Social Science & Medicine
Pedro Pita Barros, Luis C Nunes

Abstract

Pharmaceutical spending in many countries has seen a steep increase in recent years. Governments have adopted several measures to reduce pharmaceutical expenditure growth, ranging from increased co-payments to price decreases determined administratively. Promotion of generic consumption has also ranked high in political priorities. We adopt a novel time series approach to the detection of which policy measures have a noticeable impact. The number and timing of the structural breaks are endogenously determined. As an illustration, we assess the overall impact of the several policy measures on total pharmaceutical spending, using monthly data from January 1995 to August 2008 for the Portuguese market. Our findings suggest that, in general, policy measures aimed at controlling pharmaceutical expenditure have been unsuccessful. Two breaks that were identified coincide with administratively determined price decreases. Measures aimed at increasing competition in the market had no visible effect on the dynamics of Government spending in pharmaceutical products. In particular, the introduction of reference pricing had only a transitory effect of less than one year, with historical growth resuming quickly. The consequence of this policy...Continue Reading

References

Feb 7, 2006·Social Science & Medicine·Albert A Okunade, Chutima Suraratdecha
Dec 1, 2007·Health Economics·Jesús ClementeAntonio Montañés

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Citations

Feb 24, 2015·International Journal of Clinical Pharmacy·Nazila YousefiSamaneh NourMohammadi
Oct 28, 2018·Applied Health Economics and Health Policy·Dominik J Wettstein, Stefan Boes
Nov 24, 2016·International Journal of Health Economics and Management·Mats A BergmanNiklas Rudholm

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