Drugs cheaper than threepenny: the market of extremely low-priced drugs within the National Health Insurance in Taiwan

Abstract

While most drug policy researches paid attention to the financial impact of expensive drugs, the market situation of low-priced drugs in a country was seldom analyzed. We used the nationally representative claims datasets to explore the status within the National Health Insurance (NHI) in Taiwan. In 2007, a total of 12,443 distinct drug items had been prescribed 853,250,147 times with total expenditure of 105,216,950,198 new Taiwan dollars (NTD). Among them, 7,366 oral drug items accounted for 701,353,383 prescribed items and 68,133,988,960 NTD.