Effects of Policies to Promote the Use of Generic Drugs
Hitoshi Tamashi ( The Office of Pharmaceutical Industry Research Former Senior Research Fellow)
(No.61: Published November 2013)
The government and the Ministry of Health, Labour and Welfare (MHLW) have positioned the expansion of the use of generic drugs, which have a significantly lower market share than in developed Western countries, as a key issue for controlling medical costs as part of securing financial resources for the continuation of a sustainable social security system. Starting with the introduction of the DPC policy in 2003, Japan has successively introduced policies to promote the use of generic drugs that have taken root in Western countries, such as alternative dispensing and generic name prescribing.
This paper estimates the impact of these policies on the market by using the statistical method of "Difference in differences (DID). Procedure Combination (DPC), which gradually began to have a positive impact on the growth rate of the generic drug market as the number of DPC beds increased, and the introduction of alternative dispensing methods, which were revised and reintroduced after their introduction, were also found to have an impact. However, in all cases, it was estimated that the policies to promote the use of generics had a certain impact on the market.
In addition, we estimated the overall impact of each generic drug use promotion policy and the impact of each policy individually for each drug group in the ATC1 drug effect classification, and examined the differences in the impact of policies by drug effect. The results revealed that some efficacy groups were not affected by any generic drug use promotion policy, while other efficacy groups were statistically significantly affected by approximately all policies.