The Pharmaceutical Benefits Scheme is under siege. This financial year its costs are expected to increase by a $774 million, a 21.5 per cent jump to $4.26 billion. that is far greater than the nine per cent predicted a year ago. Some changes are clearly necessary.
A large part of the blow-out can be put down to the cost of just two drugs, Celebrex, an anti-inflammatory drug, and Zyban, a drug which is used it to help people give up smoking. Both these drugs can be categorised as lifestyle drugs. Perhaps more significantly, both these drugs have been advertised widely in the community. Celebrex, was expected it to cost about $40 million a year when it was listed nine months ago. It has already cost $140 million. Zyban has cost $40 million against an estimate of $10 million.
It would be a tragedy for their health care of Australians if advertising by pharmaceutical companies coupled with the high cost of some drugs were it to wreck the benefits scheme, particularly if the drugs that do it the threatening are not life-saving but merely drugs that alleviate conditions largely self-inflicted by an ageing baby boom generation.
The scheme has a long and been a sore for drug companies whose prices have been controlled by it, but it has been an extraordinarily beneficial scheme for the average Australian. Since its inception are more than 40 years ago the scheme has insured that major life-preserving and disease-preventing drugs have been available to all Australians irrespective of their capacity to pay. The scheme is a quintessential example of the difference between a decent society and one which is based on greed and money.
Initially, the scheme gave a just few drugs free to the whole population. Now it gives a board range of drugs subsidised. In the past 40 years there has been commendable attention by governments of all persuasions to make continuous minor changes to the scheme to insure its ongoing viability. From time to time the Government has fine-tuned co-payments by a beneficiaries, changed access to drugs, put in a safety-net system, and curbed demand by imposing a co-payment by pensioners off-set by an increase in pension payments.
However, for every government move to bolster a scheme that delivers drugs to Australians at reasonable prices, there is an equal and opposite move by the pharmaceutical companies to sabotage the scheme and replace it with a free market scheme which would give them far higher returns for each drug description. To their credit, both major parties have resisted attempts by the pharmaceutical companies and by doctors to undermine scheme. In the case of the Coalition that may not be because of an ideological commitment but rather because the Coalition it recognises that the scheme has a huge support among the Australian public.
The test for the government now is to cap the cost of lifestyle drugs; to reduce the influence of advertising by pharmaceutical companies which in turn causes ordinary patients to demand particular drugs from their doctor; to educate doctors so that they can resist the demand for the prescription of expensive drugs; to weigh up whether expenditure on drugs is the most effective way to tackle a health problem; and to ensure that when a drug is listed that it does not result in open-slaver prescription of that drug for a range of conditions wider than the original purpose for which the drug was put on the list. These are not easy tasks. But the government must be constantly attentive to making lots of small adjustments from time to time to ensure that the basic scheme remains viable rather than allowing the scheme it to collapse. That would be a calamity for the well-being and health of Australians as a whole.