Comparison of Drug Prices for Chronic Disease and High Utilization Value Drugs between Public and Private Hospitals

Abstract

Drug is one of basic essential need for human life. There were reports of the differenc in drug prices between public and private hospitals. The objective of this study was to compare the difference of drug prices between public and private hospitals in three chronic diseases groups and high utilization value drug groups. This was a descriptive study using data of drug prices retrieved from the database of the National Health Security Office according to the Thai Medicines Terminology. Data analysis was conducted using minimum, maximum, median, and percentile 25th and 75th in order to compare the drug prices between public and private hospitals as well as to compare with the reference price from the National List of Essential Medicines (NLEM) announcement. It was found that the differences of drug selling prices between public and private hospitals in three chronic diseases groups that consist of dyslipidemia, hyper-tension and diabetes were 0.9-9.0, 0.6-15.4 and 1.0-10.0 times, respectively. Comparing the drug prices of public and private hospitals with the reference price from NLEM revealed that the prices of public hospitals for dyslipidemia, hypertension and diabetes were 1.2-5.2, 1.0-5.8 and 0.5-4.7 time differ-ences, respectively, while the private hospitals were 1.2-22.0, 2.0-28.0 and 2.1-23.4 times, respec-tively. Furthermore, original drugs with monopoly sale had less different price than those with both local and original suppliers. Likewise, there was relatively little price difference for high utilization drugs. The drug prices of private hospitals were found to be higher than those of public hospitals in all three chronic diseases; while less difference drug prices were observed for high utilization drug group which might be due to less possibility to top-up the price for cheaper drugs. The results of this study could be useful to develop reimbursement policies of drug prices.