EDITORIAL - Just implement the law

The time to argue for or against a proposed law is during congressional deliberations on the measure. And the pluses and minuses of the measure seeking to bring down medicine prices were argued to death in the two chambers of Congress before it became law. Early last year, Congress approved the reconciled version of the measure. In June last year, President Arroyo finally signed into law Republic Act 9502, or the Universally Accessible Cheaper and Quality Medicines Act of 2008.

The public, long burdened by the cost of medicine, waited for the law to take effect and bring down drug prices. And the public waited… and waited some more.

Yesterday, with the 13-month-old law still not enforced, the government announced that it had given pharmaceutical companies until this Saturday to voluntarily slash by up to 50 percent the prices of 22 drugs used for the treatment of hypertension, diabetes and asthma. Also included in the list are antibiotics used for common ailments.

The government made the announcement as Senate President Juan Ponce Enrile accused a pharmaceutical giant during a Senate hearing yesterday of virtually bribing the government with about five million medicine discount cards for the poor in exchange for President Arroyo’s withholding of an executive order that would impose price ceilings on 22 essential drugs.

RA 9502 gave the President the power to impose medicine price controls. The idea was to give her the authority to bring down medicine prices if the goal of RA 9502 could not be achieved through measures provided in the law, including parallel importation and patent protection limits that will allow local companies to produce generic versions of certain drugs produced by multinationals.

The pharmaceutical industry had lobbied fiercely against several provisions of the law, succeeding in killing a proposal to require doctors to prescribe only generic medicine. The lobby has also apparently succeeded in delaying the implementation of the law. From medicine to relieve the common cold to complex drug cocktails for illnesses such as tuberculosis, drug prices in this country remain high compared to those in other Asian countries.

Pharmaceutical firms, whose executives met with President Arroyo and several of her Cabinet members last July 8 to discuss the planned price ceilings, have long defended their pricing schemes and have argued that key provisions of RA 9502 are not the answer. The public won’t know for sure until the law is given a chance to work. Amendments can be made later.