ADVOCACY
Summer 2016 / Issue 50
Domestic Drug Market is Becoming Less Attractive
Why is big pharma leaving Macedonia?
The regulation of
drug prices, or their
repeated reduction,
as well as parallel
imports of medicines
have led to a decline
in the interest of large
global pharmaceutical companies in the
Macedonian market.
16 AMCHAM MAGAZINE
Author: Igor Petrovski
for Kapital magazine
issue 855 – Special
Pharmacy Feature,
date:18.03.2016
O
nly two new drugs or “molecules”, as they
are called in the industry have entered the
“positive list” of the Macedonian State
Health Insurance Fund in the last eight
years, according to our sources who are
insiders in the drug market but insisted on remaining off
the record on the topic. The absence of new, innovative
medicines on the list of drugs for which the State fully or
partially covers costs, causes a few adverse effects, they
say: citizens have limited ability to treat themselves with
modern medicines and the world’s major pharmaceutical companies that are manufacturers of these drugs
are slowly losing interest in the Macedonian market and
closing their offices or reducing their operations, leaving
them with 2-3 employees here.
Almost all of the world’s major pharmaceutical manufacturers that have launched new molecules or formulas