Penalise Healthcare Sector Heavily for Unfair Practices: Former Pfizer MD

Pharma industry expert and former managing director at Pfizer, Kewal Handa told NDTV that just probes and studies into unfair practices prevalent within the medical system in India will yield nothing, individuals and entities involved in such acts must be heavily penalised and fined.

"We need to have these rules and regulations in place for unfair practices just like heavy penalties and fines, that will be the biggest deterrent to all the companies to engage in it, the doctors to engage in it, unless we have that in place we would be just doing studies and not take action," he said. (Watch full interview)

Fair trade regulator Competition Commission of India, concerned over a possible nexus between doctors and pharmaceutical companies, has said it will soon carry out a detailed study of pharmaceutical and healthcare services sector in the national capital region (NCR).

Public and private hospitals, insurance companies, pharmaceutical firms and their associations, doctors and their associations, among others, would be covered under the study.

"CCI doing a survey and coming to conclusion that these are the unfair practices, where do we go from there - you need to have laws, you need to have regulations, you need to clearly spell out what are these unfair practices and what could be the penalties and what could be the implications. I think without that the CCI exercise would be just exposing few companies here and there," Mr Handa said.

The industry veteran pointed out that there have been some studies in the past that have revealed that patients were "highly charged" for  stents and implants, but very serious investigative studies to stem out the rot has not yet happened.

"These types of unfair practices if it were to take place in a country like the US, there are clear laid down laws and there are penalties and you have seen how penalties can be of $500 million to $2 billion," he said.

Over the past few years, the competition watchdog has come across various issues in the pharmaceutical sector and healthcare delivery systems/services. These include "non-availability of essential medicines, increasing price of drugs, nexus between pharmaceutical companies and pharmacists, nexus between pharmacists and doctors, nexus between doctors and pathological laboratories, nexus between doctors and pharmaceutical companies, and nexus between hospitals and insurance companies etc.", CCI said.

"The primary objective of the baseline study/survey is to collect information and credible evidences on competition issues in the concerned sector and present the same in an analytical manner," it added.

(With PTI inputs)