In the past, free price setting mechanisms in Germany led to high prices of patented pharmaceuticals and to increasing expenditures in the pharmaceutical sector. In order to control patented pharmaceutical prices and to curb increasing pharmaceutical spending, the Act for Restructuring the...

Wie funktioniert Gesundheitspolitik anderswo und warum? Seit März 2003 berichten Experten aus sechzehn Industrieländern zweimal jährlich zu aktuellen Entwicklungen in der Gesundheitspolitik. Schwerpunkte des vorliegenden zweiten Reports "Gesundheitspolitik in Industrieländern" (Zeitraum...

Rising pharmaceutical expenditure has become a major concern for policy makers in Germany over recent years. Therefore, the pharmaceutical market has been increasingly targeted by different kinds of regulation, focussing on both the supply and the demand side, using price, volume and spending...

OBJECTIVE: To examine the price reactions of German pharmacies to changes made to OTC drug regulations in 2004. Prior to these changes, regulations guaranteed identical prices in all German pharmacies. METHODS: Two years after market deregulation, 256 pharmacies were surveyed to determine the...

Since their introduction in 1993, the structure of physician drug budgets in Germany has changed frequently. Although highly disputed, they have limited the pharmaceutical expenditure of the Statutory Health Insurance Scheme for nearly one decade. This raises the question of how these savings...