KUALA LUMPUR, April 19 — Putrajaya needs to implement a pricing policy and monitoring system for medicine sold in the country if it sincerely intends to provide affordable healthcare to all Malaysians under the coming 11th Malaysia Plan, a DAP lawmaker said today.

Klang MP Charles Santiago said the cost of healthcare is increasingly out of reach of the middle class and poor Malaysians, a situation that is compounded by the implementation of the Goods and Services Tax (GST) last April 1.

“For example, a person with HIV, who is paying RM2,190 for life-saving medicine, will incur a further RM130 expenditure in GST payment on a monthly basis,” he said in a statement.

“And we have not considered the cost of medical care and life-saving medicine for people with cancer and other medical conditions such as diabetes, mental health and hypertension, which are high in the country,” he added.

Charles said the lack of a pricing policy and monitoring system has spawned a situation where the retail price of medicine in Malaysia far exceeds that of many other countries.

Citing a 2012 article in the Journal of Pharmaceutical Health Services, he said retail drug prices in Penang were nearly 150 per cent higher than that of Australia.

The study also found that Malaysian retail pharmacies routinely mark up prices by between 25 and 38 per cent for innovator brands and between 100 and 140 per cent for generic drugs, he said.

“As such, access to medicine in Malaysia is more expensive than in other developing countries, such as India and Sri Lanka,” he said, adding that the price of essential drugs varies across Malaysia due to the absence of a national drug pricing policy.

Charles stressed that the implementation of a pricing policy and monitoring system is a natural step towards fulfilling Putrajaya’s own 2009 National Medicines Policy, which was drafted with the aim of promoting “equitable access and rational use of safe, effective and affordable essential medicines of good quality” for the public.

It, however, must go hand in hand with more transparent handling of the government’s procurement of medicine to eliminate political interference in the country’s medicine distribution industry, he added.

“Providing affordable medicine to its population is a fundamental obligation of any government.

“This means that the government has to start regulating the price of medicine immediately,” he said.