8
The Journal Reporting on the community
FEBRUARY/MARCH 2019
Anne Calteux of the health ministry says initiative is reducing prices of rare drugs
What the Beneluxa group is bargaining for Luxembourg and four other European countries, the latest being Ireland, have
clubbed together to try bringing down the price of recently approved and scarce pharmaceuticals. The Beneluxa initiative aims to make new treatments and so-called orphan drugs available at an affordable price to patients in participating countries. Orphan drugs are treatments for rare diseases which are difficult to acquire or extremely expensive because the lack of a profitable market discourages companies to invest in them. The group was started by the Belgian and Dutch health ministers in 2015. They
were joined by Luxembourg in 2015 and Austria in 2016. Ireland joined in June 2018. Anne Calteux, senior policy advisor at the ministry of health in Luxembourg, told Delano in December that “the accent put by the initiative on rare diseases convinced Luxembourg to join this project”. As a coalition of countries, Beneluxa has more leverage in price negotiations with pharmaceutical companies and can demand more transparency into how the costs of new drugs are set. Working together by sharing data and policies also improves the price transparency between
the countries, which ideally allows relatively unified prices and policies for patients. The initiative also conducts joint health technology assessments and participates in “horizon scanning”. That is the practice of detecting new and groundbreaking treatments before they reach the market by analysing data and research output. This allows countries to make informed decisions for their reimbursement policies. It further allows national authorities to “better react to possible impacts on health budgets,” said Calteux. To render this process more effective, the outfit is setting up a permanent