Politico: Romanian patients gain access to new drugs two years after Germans

Patients in wealthy Western European states gain access to new medicines much faster than those in Eastern states, according to a new analysis from Politico.eu. “A doctor in Romania waits on average two years to prescribe the same cutting-edge drug as their counterpart in Germany. If someone is suffering from a life-threatening illness such as cancer, that’s the difference between life and death,” reads the article.

EU health commissioner Stella Kyriakides noted the difference while presenting the Commission’s proposal to reform Europe's pharmaceutical market in April of this year.

“Patients in Western and bigger member states have access to 90% of newly approved medicines. In Eastern and smaller member states, this number is as low as 10%,” the EU official said, cited by Politico.

The differences in access come from the fact that pharmaceutical companies do not launch their new products in all 27 EU states within the first two years. Their motives are primarily related to the financial aspect.

“Some drugs are really expensive. And there are big economic differences within the 27 EU countries — Bulgaria’s GDP per capita is almost five times less than the Netherlands, for example. It means that some countries can spend more on health care — and drugs — than others,” Politico highlights.

Countries like Austria, Germany, and Switzerland spend between EUR 92-108 per person on cancer drugs, while the Czech Republic, Latvia, and Poland spend around EUR 13-16, according to a study by the Swedish Institute for Health Economics.

“A large share of European cancer patients, especially in Eastern Europe, cannot gain access to effective (and potentially cost-effective) medicines due to affordability-related reasons,” write the researchers, cited by Politico.

The pricing of medicines is another problem. The most common way of negotiating prices in Europe is that pharmaceutical companies haggle over prices with governments directly, and in secret, so no country really knows what another is paying for a drug. Drug makers prefer to launch drugs in richer countries first, so they can set higher reference prices from the beginning. Eastern European states, but also southern countries like Portugal or Greece, get the same drugs roughly two years later.

Drug companies, in turn, say that excessive bureaucracy prevents drugs from being available faster.

To remedy the situation, the Politico analysis suggests, EU states should band together and pool money to buy drugs. “The so-called Joint Health Technology Assessment will produce a single EU-wide evaluation of new medicines to help countries decide how much to pay — rather than 27 national dossiers for each drug, as is the case now. The first joint assessment is expected in 2025,” the authors say.