• Adrian Towse.
• Office of Health Economics, London.
• Health Aff (Millwood). 2003 May 1; 22 (3): 42-5.

AbstractManaging drug use in a way that maximizes the value obtained from total health care spending faces obstacles; hence, payers and policymakers tend to look at pharmaceutical expenditures in isolation from the rest of health care spending. Currently there are both regulatory and putative market-based approaches to containing pharmaceutical spending worldwide. But evidence suggests that regulatory efforts in Europe and elsewhere have not proved effective in containing costs or improving efficiency or access, and supposedly market-based solutions now in vogue, such as reference pricing, pose their own set of challenges and may in practice violate market principles. In the end, silo-based budgeting is short-sighted; the emphasis in Europe and in the United States should be on measures that achieve efficient health care rather than the containment of drug spending.

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