Revision of the Pharmaceutical legislation: BEUC response to public consultation

Medicines are crucial when we are sick or suffer from a long-term condition, so we need to have easy access to them. Unfortunately, there might be medicine shortages, or medicines that are not reimbursed to consumers because of how expensive they are.

Both of these problems challenge our healthcare system. In addition, new medicines don’t always work better than existing treatments. These problems should be addressed by amending the EU pharmaceutical legislation and adopting new measures in relation to medicines’ development, authorisation, availability and affordability.

The revision of the EU general pharmaceutical legislation must improve access to medicines across Member States. The EU must:

• Improve medicine marketing authorisation;
• Improve medicine avaiability;
• Increase medicine affordabilty.