Government forms committee to cap stent prices in Bangladesh

The government has formed a 17-member committee to cap the prices of stents used in cardiac surgery.

Senior Correspondentbdnews24.com
Published : 18 April 2017, 09:09 AM
Updated : 18 April 2017, 10:52 AM

At a press briefing on Tuesday, Directorate General of Drug Administration (DGDA) Maj Gen Md Mustafizur Rahman said the committee had already met with the importers and found that the price can be slashed “by 50 percent easily”.

The move followed the Indian example, where authorities could cut the price of stents by 75 percent by including the device on the essential drug list.

“We’ll also do that. But for us it’ll take time because we depend absolutely on imports, mostly from the US, Europe and Japan. For this we cannot take any strict measures hastily. India is a producer country,” the director general said. “I think we’ll be able to fix the price in two months”.

Bangladesh is a small market of stents as the director general said only 18,000 stents are being imported annually by 21 importers.

But it is unregulated. The price is said to be five to six times more than the actual price as importers do not inscribe price stickers.

The import is duty and VAT free, and according to the government rules, they can sell at a maximum of 1.55 times more than their import price.

The director general said experts, government officials including Commissioner of Customs and representatives from the National Board of Revenue, importers’ representatives and drug industry leaders are the members of the committee.

“Initially we talked with the importers and asked them for a revised price. Four importers came up and proposed that they can keep the minimum price from Tk 25,000 to Tk 50,000. We are encouraging them to keep that price until we can control all the importers”.

He said the committee also decided to list all the medical devices being imported to Bangladesh, and force them to comply with rates fixed by government.

“Inscribing market retail price, product registration number and expiry date would be mandatory in stents”, he said, adding that “we’ll go slow, so that importers cannot hold patients  hostage. But we’ll regulate them to ensure quality stents at affordable price”.