Today, the Health Committee of the Spanish Congress will vote on a compromise amendment, an agreement reached by several parliamentary groups, which, if approved, would legally enshrine the secrecy of the real prices of medicines and the terms under which they are publicly funded. This would represent a serious setback for transparency, accountability and equitable access to treatment.
A measure of this magnitude should not be introduced without a thorough and specific parliamentary debate on its implications for public health, healthcare spending and the use of public resources. Moreover, legally entrenching secrecy around medicine prices runs counter to the work that Salud por Derecho and many other organisations have been carrying out for years to promote greater transparency in pharmaceutical markets and stronger accountability in the use of public funds. A decision that affects billions of euros in healthcare expenditure and access to medicines deserves an open public debate, not an indirect route through an amendment. When medicines are financed with public money, citizens have the right to know how much is actually being paid and under what conditions.
Price opacity does not protect healthcare systems. It weakens the government’s negotiating position, leaves the public sector at a disadvantage in relation to the pharmaceutical industry and makes democratic scrutiny of decisions affecting public budgets and access to treatment more difficult. Keeping these data secret by law does not improve access to medicines; it can make access harder and increase costs for health systems.
The consequences of this lack of transparency extend far beyond Spain. As a country that plays an important role in international reference pricing systems, keeping real medicine prices secret contributes to sustaining high prices in other healthcare systems, with direct consequences for global access to medicines. Defending transparency in Spain is therefore also a matter of global health. This is a far-reaching decision. It affects how much pharmaceutical innovation actually costs the public sector and whether that information can be known and scrutinised. When prices and funding conditions remain secret, citizens, patients and public institutions lose the ability to assess whether decisions are being made in the public interest.
To learn more about this issue, you can consult the report published by the No es Sano alliance, which examines the impact of opacity in net medicine pricing and its consequences for access, health system sustainability and global health. You can also read our ten recommendations for advancing towards a more transparent pharmaceutical market that better serves the public interest.
