Out-of-pocket expenditure on health is pegged at 62%. Medicines account for a large share of this. This is the context in which the current proposal before the government must be understood. Among other aspects that GoI needs to consider is the way many medicines need to be repackaged. It has been suggested that drug manufacturers provide on every unit for sale critical information – name, composition, manufacturing and expiration date, identification and batch number, and statutory warnings. That would mean putting more information in a smaller space, exacerbating an existing problem. The elderly and those with poor eyesight find it difficult to read what is written on medicine strips anyway. This leaves the possibility of medicine being incorrectly ingested precariously high. Public safeguards require special attention to packaging and labelling, especially for proposed smaller units.
The best way to reduce unnecessary expenses and bodily risk is to invest in a strong public health infrastructure that includes doctors prescribing and pharmacists dispensing the right treatment and medication. In all this, having the GP – general practitioner, the family physician familiar with individual patients – back in the centre of things would be a boost for the ‘body politic’.
