CAIRO: The Supreme Administrative Court has adjourned hearing the challenge brought by the government against an April 2010 ruling that froze application of a Ministry of Health decree that radically altered the way medicines are priced. The Egyptian Initiative for Personal Rights (EIPR) filed a case against decree 373 in October 2009, demanding that it be suspended and eventually abolished. The court of administrative justice ruled in EIPR's favor on April 27, 2010. During the first appeal hearing held on Monday EIPR says that the Ministry of Health gave the court false information, “claiming that the implementation of the new pricing system had led to price cuts for some 40 pharmaceutical drugs”. “This contradicts statements from the Minister of Health and other ministry officials that the decree would only apply to drugs registered after the new system goes into effect,” EIPR says in a statement published Thursday. Kamal Sabra, the assistant minister of health for pharmaceutical affairs, has consistently denied that the decree will be backdated. In February, the Minister of Health announced that the prices of 40 imported medicines had been reduced under decree 373. When asked about this by Daily News Egypt Sabra insisted that the price changes of these 40 medicines “has nothing to do with decree 373 and was not taken under its provisions.” Sabra could not be reached for comment on Monday's hearing. Decree 373 linked the pricing of both imported innovator brands and generic products to prices in the international market. EIPR says that if implemented the decree will drastically undermine access by Egypt's poor to medicine by significantly raising drug prices. The pre-existing Cost Plus system priced medicines on the basis of the cost of the raw materials used to produce them. While the government and drug companies maintain that prices will not increase under the decree, EIPR point to the fact that two drug companies, the Egyptian International Pharmaceutical Industries Company (EIPICO) and the Egyptian Association for Pharmaceutical Producers (EAPP), have petitioned to support the government's appeal as evidence to the contrary. This development, the NGO suggests, “will indeed lead to higher prices for drugs and more profits for drug companies — a point stressed by EIPR since it first contested the drug pricing decree and confirmed by the lower court's decision”. The Court of Administrative Justice in April ordered a suspension of decree 373 because, the statement reads, “it willfully ignored ‘the social dimension that the legislator carefully considered' when designing the old pricing system”. The court also held that increased drug prices would be “an inevitable repercussion” of the decree.
