Health Policy and Planning Advance Access originally published online on January 16, 2006
Health Policy and Planning 2006 21(2):123-131; doi:10.1093/heapol/czj011
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Original article |
Improving access to pharmaceuticals in Brazil and Argentina
1 School of Public Health, University of Texas-Houston and 2 Department of Sociology, University of Texas-Austin, Texas, USA
Correspondence: Núria Homedes, University of Texas, School of Public Health, 1100 North Stanton, Suite # 110, El Paso, Texas 79902, USA. Tel: +1 915–747 8508; Fax: +1 915–747 8512; E-mail: nhomedes{at}utep.edu
The population of many Latin American countries is having increasing difficulty in accessing needed medicines due to the rise in their unitary cost and the growing number of poor in most countries of the region. A number of countries have taken steps to increase access to pharmaceuticals and have had different levels of success. This article reports on two country-wide programmes: the AIDS programme in Brazil, which has been judged as being highly successful, and the Remediar programme that has been implemented recently in Argentina. Both programmes have significantly increased access to needed pharmaceuticals, and Argentina has done it in a record time. In the discussion, we suggest that pharmaceutical interventions are successful when there is a firm political commitment, they are comprehensive, include the participation of civil society, and use a combination of methods to control the rising cost of medicines, including centralized international competitive bidding processes for drug procurement and reliance on multi-source drugs.
Key Words: pharmaceutical interventions, AIDS/HIV, essential drugs, Brazil, Argentina, Remediar
1For a discussion on the definitions of the different types of drugs see Homedes and Ugalde (2005).
2Note that the savings on hospital admissions in 2001 (US$360 million, Table 1) were higher than the total cost of ARV for the year (US$232 million, Table 2).
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