Generics Favored In Sweeping French Reforms

Generic drugs will be given priority in the French health service and tougher controls will ensure patients get the treatments they need and no more. Those were two of the messages delivered to the National Assembly by the Prime Minister, Alain Juppe, in an address winding up two days of debate on social security and health service cost containment.

Mr Juppe said that under the arrangements for generics, pharmacists would have the opportunity to deliver "precisely the quantity of drugs necessary for treatment," as was already the case, for example, in the UK. This would avoid the sort of over-prescribing of large packs of drugs which ended up scarcely used, were reimbursed by the French social security system and ended in the incinerator.

Opening his comments, Mr Juppe said it is the government's commitment to improve the quality of health care. A national health spending limit will be fixed for 1996 and this will be strictly linked to the price index. Economies amounting to about 5 billion French francs ($1.02 billion) have also been called for by the Prime Minister from both the doctors and the drug industry, a measure described by Mr Juppe as "efforts of solidarity."