At Chinese national meeting of heads of price bureaus held on October 27, leaders of National Development and Reform Commission (NDRC) proposed to decontrol prices of pharmaceutical products, including pharmaceutical products in basic medical insurance drug catalogue, blood products, prophylactic immunization pharmaceutical products and contraceptives uniformly purchased by China, category I psychotropic and narcotic pharmaceutical products and proprietary drugs, etc.. It's worth noting that blood products are planned for pilot price decontrol before the end of 2014, and it is possible that the price scheme of pharmaceutical products in basic medical insurance drug catalog will be submitted to State Council for approval and is expected to be implemented in January 2015.
According to pharmaceutical product price administrative provisions of NDRC, currently the prices of pharmaceutical products are divided into three varieties: government pricing, government guidance price and market-adjusted price. Pricing power of pharmaceutical products is separately executed by Chinese national price control department and provincial price control department, and they separately formulate the pricing catalogue. Enterprises are required to apply and be approved by the price control department regardless of which pricing method; the price of pharmaceutical product is not directly related to market supply and demand regardless of pricing method of experts’ examination or method of administrative approval. For example, the price rise or fall of traditional Chinese medicinal materials currently are normal phenomena in market; however, prices of Chinese patent medicines taking traditional Chinese medicinal materials as raw materials cannot be regulated according to changes of market supply and demand.
