3 | 12/30/2020 – 8:17 am (GMT-4)
The Cuban government announced that it will subsidize medicines to those people who cannot cope with the new ones prices of medicines, which will increase from January 1, as part of the monetary unification process.
“If even with the increase in salary and the increase in cost, someone can not pay a short treatment, he will be cared for through Social Welfare,” said the head of the Commission for the implementation of the guidelines, Marino Murillo Jordi.
Rising prices for such high-demand products as antibiotics and painkillers, which will no longer be subsidized, are a matter of great concern to the population.
The salary increase, projected at 4.9 times, will be less than the price increase that 54 percent of medicines will suffer.
Resolution 345 of the Ministry of Finance and Prices, published in the Official Gazette number 71, reveals that drugs such as amoxicillin, which may cost up to 33.70 pesos, while dipyrone, which in 2018 it was worth 3.50 pesos, it will now cost 13 times more, exactly 47.80 pesos.
In the middle of a severe and prolonged deprivation in the pharmacy network, It was announced that the basic table of medicines, consisting in 2019 of 757 drugs, will be reduced from 2021 to 619 products.
According to Emilio Delgado Iznaga, director of Medicines and Medical Technology of the Ministry of Public Health (MINSAP), the cause is the financial tensions we have faced, the resurgence of the blockade and the situation generated by COVID-19 was affected, resulting in low coverage “.
Among the drugs that will not continue to be produced are naproxen (anti-inflammatory) and sulfasalazine, used in digestive disorders and patients with ulcerative colitis.
The state will keep subsidized the prices of the medicines associated to chronic diseases with permanent treatments – those that are sold by the well-known card; those used for long periods in patients with neurological and psychiatric diseases, as well as natural and traditional medicine products, and optics.
Earlier, the Government announced that it is planned to allocate 7 billion pesos to subsidize medicines in 2021. The figure constitutes a minimum amount of 30 billion intended to cover subsidies in general in the country. Of this budget, more than half (17,878,000) will be to subsidize the electricity tariff.
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