Have Medicinal Prices Increased Over 200% in the Last 11 Months?

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Context: On July 25, 2019, Ms. Bakhtawar Bhutto-Zardari made a twitter claim that “medicines [prices] have gone up over 200% in the last 11 months.” She went on to quote an article from The News to prove the said point.

Claim: Medicine [prices] have gone up over 200% in the past 11 months. 

Claimant: Ms. Bakhtawar Bhutto-Zardari

Source of Claim:

Status: False

Sources:

Report/Ruling:

The claim that medicine prices have gone up by 200% in the past 11 months is untrue as during the past 11 months, prices of medicines, on the average, have gone up by 9.8%.

The Consumer Price Indices (CPI) of the past 11 months (August 2018 to June 2019), provided by the Pakistan Bureau of Statistics, shows that our price index for medicines in August 2018 stood at 178.61, while in June 2019, it was recorded at 196.13 which translates into an increase of 9.8% in prices.

Ms. Bakhtawar Bhutto-Zardari went on to quote an article to prove her claim. However, the said article claims that “the prices of 463 hardship medicines have been increased up to 200 percent.” The original claim, therefore, is only applicable to 463 hardship medicines and states that prices are being increased “up to” 200 per cent and not “over 200” per cent. The price increase in question was brought by the Drug Regulatory Authority of Pakistan (DRAP) through issuance of SRO 1608(I)/2018, SRO 1609(I)/2018, SRO 1610(I)/2018 and SRO 34 (I)/2019 during the incumbent government’s tenure. The first three increased the prices only for certain hardship drugs. The last SRO only allows a 9% increase for hardship drugs and 15% for remaining drugs.

Thus, while drug prices have indeed risen, those of certain hardship drugs disproportionately so, her claim that medicine prices have risen over 200 per cent in the past 11 months is false.

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