HEALTHCARE

Centre's plan on tweaking MCI clause on generics will not work: IMA chief

drug-tablets-reuters Representative image | Reuters

Any change in the Medical Council of India's (MCI) clause on doctors prescribing generic medicines will not work, Dr K.K. Aggarwal, national president of the Indian Medical Association told THE WEEK. Aggarwal was referring to the MCI rule stating that "Every physician should prescribe drugs with generic names legibly and preferably in capital letters, and he/she shall ensure that there is a rational prescription and use of drugs.” The words “legibly and preferably in capital letters” were added after an amendment last year.

At a press conference on Jan Aushadi stores last week, Union minister for chemicals and fertilizers Ananth Kumar hinted at an amendment in the rule to ensure that doctors were bound to prescribe only generic medicines.

With the government's ongoing push for generic medicines to ensure "affordable healthcare", the MCI clause has been in the middle of a controversy over its "true" interpretation. A notification by the Union Ministry of Health and Family Welfare last month cited this clause and reminded doctors that they were obligated to follow it. 

However, the IMA chief responded to the ruling by stating that the word "should" in the clause implied that the rule was not mandatory. 

Now, according to Kumar, the word "should" would soon be replaced with "shall", making the rule mandatory. 

But Aggarwal contends that the word play will not work because authorities did not understand the ground situation. "People in the government need to understand that doctors are anyway writing only generic drugs!," he said. 

The confusion has arisen because the same drug was being sold by multiple companies at different prices—generic generic, trade generic (promoted by chemists) and branded generics. "The price differential between them can be in the range of 700-800 per cent," he says, adding that the government needed to first disallow such a price differential.

Aggarwal says that the recent statements made by Kumar and Union minister for health and family welfare Jagat Prakash Nadda, on this issue—recently, Nadda had also hinted at a law to ensure doctors were bound to prescribe generic medicines—had only caused confusion among doctors. "Unless the price is regulated in a way that there is no differentiation for the same drug, the confusion is bound to continue," he said. 

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