Is the trend of "volume increase and price decrease" in adjusting the tax rate of imported drugs?

On April 8, the Tariff Commission of the State Council announced that with the approval of the State Council, the Commission decided to adjust the import tax on imported goods, reducing the tax rates of items 1 and 2 of the import tax on imported goods to 13% and 20% respectively Among them, the annotation of "drugs" in tax item 1 is revised to "for imported drugs with import value-added tax reduced by 3% according to national regulations, the tax shall be levied according to the goods tax rate" The above adjustment will be implemented from April 9 It can be concluded that the import of drugs will further accelerate its entry into China on the basis of last week's online verification of the three regulatory documents, including the customs clearance form for imported drugs, on the basis of the pilot networking in the early stage In addition to the "4 + 7" negative growth in drug import for the first time, the state has made efforts to improve the accessibility of imported drugs through the combination policies such as zero tariff of anti-cancer drugs, accelerating the approval of listing, national negotiation, etc new features of drug import have emerged: the price of imported drugs will continue to fall in the future, and the number of imported drugs is expected to stabilize growth According to the latest statistics of China Customs, the amount of imported western medicine preparations and biochemical drugs dropped significantly in 2018 Among them, western medicine decreased by 24.05% year-on-year, with an amount of US $13.03 billion; biochemical medicine import fell 41.21% year-on-year, with an amount of RMB 4.753 billion According to the import data of all drugs, the import amount in 2018 was US $50.429 billion, down 9.75% year on year Note that this is the first negative growth in the context of sustained growth in China's pharmaceutical imports over the years However, in sharp contrast to the negative growth, in 2018, with the support of a series of policies, such as priority review and approval, accelerating the listing of drugs already on the market abroad and in urgent need of clinical medicine in China, the number of new drugs approved for independent research and development and the number of imported registered varieties surged According to mienei.com, in 2018, a total of 10 class 1 new drugs were approved for marketing and 61 drugs were approved for import In addition, the Tariff Commission of the State Council previously issued a document that the provisional import tariff rate will be implemented for 706 commodities from January 1, 2019, including the implementation of zero tariff on important raw materials urgently needed to be imported for the domestic production of drugs for the treatment of cancer, rare diseases, diabetes, hepatitis B, acute leukemia, etc., involving 63 varieties under 31 tax items From these two sets of data analysis, the demand for high-quality imported drugs has not decreased According to the 2018 annual report of Shanghai pharmaceutical, the national general agent of 15 of the 20 imported new drugs approved for listing in 2018 includes two major PD-1 new drugs and the first-line treatment of liver cancer new drugs, such as lewima The distribution and sales revenue of imported drugs is 76.7 billion yuan, but the significant reduction of the price of imported drugs directly leads to the reduction of the import amount According to the customs data of the active price reduction stock market, in 2018, the average import price of Western medicine preparations decreased by 25.36% year on year, and the average import price of biochemical drugs decreased by 36.32% year on year With the upgrading of China's consumption market, the improvement of consumption level, and the transformation of the role of medical insurance, the huge drug market attracts imported drugs to enter China From the perspective of value orientation, price reduction is the only way to meet the accessibility of Chinese patients First of all, from the perspective of drug prices, based on the lowest bid price of each drug in 2017-2018, the average decline of 17 negotiated drugs was 56.7%, which was about 36% lower than the market prices of surrounding countries or regions It can be seen that these drug companies have a strong desire to enter the medical insurance catalog Among them, isazolam of Takeda pharmaceutical has the highest price reduction rate, reaching 78.05%; promenadase of Hengrui pharmaceutical has the lowest price reduction rate, 21%, that is to say, domestic and foreign enterprises are bidding for the market On April 8, Liaoning provincial centralized purchase center also issued a notice that 14 cities, such as Shenyang and Dalian, will organize another joint price negotiation group for centralized purchase of drugs to start joint price negotiation for centralized purchase of drugs in the location of provincial medical institutions Although no specific price negotiation list has been released yet, according to the notice on publishing and implementing the joint price negotiation results of drug centralized purchase of medical institutions in 2018 released by the centralized purchase network of drugs and medical consumables of Liaoning Province last year, 443 drugs including many imported drugs have been successfully negotiated What is worth discussing is how will the price reduction strategy of imported drugs affect the domestic market? In March of this year, Shanghai Sunshine pharmaceutical purchase network issued a notice that the agreed purchase price of some unsuccessful "4 + 7 purchase" drug varieties was lowered, and the original Novartis research variety "imatinib mesylate tablet" was listed on the list; in the same month, Zhejiang Pharmaceutical purchase center issued a notice that Lilly's "pemetrexed disodium" linkage purchase price for injection was lowered It is believed that relatively high price is certainly not the value orientation of medical insurance After all, the social demands to reduce the burden of medical expenses of patients are embodied in the drug price, including the price reduction of imported drugs When the imported medicine has already made a lot of money in the world, its price for quantity exchange is not necessarily good for the innovative medicine just put into production in China The large-scale introduction of imported medicine will probably further reduce the price under the premise of equivalent quality in the future.