Yoona Choi and Prof. Howard Lee have recently released a 66-page white paper, titled “Policy Suggestions to Improve Patient Access to New Drugs in Korea”. This white paper was supported by a research grant from the Future Health Network (FHN), a public relations organization that has a strong interest in various cultural, societal, and systemic regulatory-political issues in Korea in association with health care.
Through this paper, Yoona and Prof. Lee overviewed the past and current policies and regulations that have governed new drug access and pharmaceutical spending in Korea. Based on this overview, they critically assessed the effectiveness, or lack thereof, of those governmental policies in increasing patient’s access to new drugs while keeping health care expenditure low. This critical analysis has enabled Yoona and Prof. Lee for coming up with practical policy suggestions to enhance the drug access for patients in Korea.
Yoona and Prof. Lee have approached the access issues in two perspectives: approval lag (or availability) and reimbursement lag (or affordability). They found out that various regulatory interventions employed vehemently by the Korean government to curb pharmaceutical spending has exerted little, if not none, impact on reducing health care expenditure nationwide while those measures have unanimously prevented patients from getting access to new drugs, indispensable for their lives. Yoona and Prof. Lee identified four areas to improve drug access in Korea: flexible incremental cost-effectiveness ratio (ICER) threshold, alternative cost-effectiveness evaluation, appropriate rationing of pharmaceutical finance, and establishment of funding source other than the national health insurance.
Before finalizing the white paper, Prof. Howard Lee presented its summary in the board of directors meeting of FHN on July 23rd. The final version of the white paper, which incorporates all of the feedbacks and discussions in the meeting, can be downloaded by clicking
this.
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