The government has warned of a risk of slippage to the tune of 1.2 billion euros in drug spending initially planned for 2024, parliamentary sources indicated this Monday, November 18. An announcement which angered the pharmaceutical industry which could be used to correct this budgetary departure.
According to an amendment to the social security financing bill (PLFSS) 2025 tabled on Monday, the government intends to rectify its health insurance expenditure objective (Ondam) for which it notes a gap of 1.2 billion compared to his initial forecast as revealed Les Echos Sunday evening. These additional expenses are attributed to an amount of discounts on medicines “significantly lower than expected”, specifies the text of the amendment.
Discounts allow you to pay less for medicines than the official price. At the end of the year, the laboratories then remit to the State the difference between the official price and the price that was negotiated.
“It’s smoke and mirrors”
The slippage is also attributed to an “error of assessment” on the dynamics of drug spending, linked to the aging of the population and the consumption of innovative, more expensive drugs, Elisabeth Doineau, budget rapporteur, told AFP. of social security in the Senate.
“All of a sudden a major forecast error falls from the sky in the accounts which were presented to Parliament and a slippage in the drug accounts?”, irritates the president of Leem, Thierry Hulot, in a reaction to the AFP. “And so, we are going to take urgent measures to plug a hole whose truth no one knows!” exasperates Thierry Hulot, also general director of the Merck laboratory in France. “To say that we received fewer discounts than expected means that the expenditure was lower. So, there cannot be a hole, it’s smoke and mirrors,” he believes. “All the expense monitoring tools put in place by Leem for years, and which are rather reliable, show no slippage,” he underlines.
According to the amendment, the excess will be “partially neutralized by the effect of the mechanism of the safeguard clause, which reduces it to 0.8 billion euros”, which suggests a greater contribution from industrialists in the medicine. Each year the social security financing law (LFSS) sets an envelope for reimbursable medicines. If sales exceed this ceiling, a mechanism called a safeguard clause applies and the laboratories must repay approximately 70% of the overpayment to Health Insurance.
“All this is up for arbitration,” declared Elisabeth Doineau, who also pleads for “a PLFRSS (amended financing bill) in the middle of next year”, because the data will probably only be consolidated at the start of year 2025. “We are going to create additional taxes and over-regulate. It’s a scandal,” annoys Thierry Hulot.