The setting of medicine prices came under intense scrutiny at the Constitutional Court on Tuesday.
The Department of Health’s advocate Marumo Moerane started off explaining how the single exit price is reached.
However, as the judges’ questions became more pressing, there was a flurry a whispering in the front benches and notes were hurriedly passed to Moerane. After a brief discussion with one of his colleagues, he was forced to revise his explanation.
”I must back down,” he said and proceeded to explain that the single exit price is set by manufacturers.
It does not change, and any wholesale or logistics fee is included in that price.
He said the manufacturers have a private arrangement with the distributors and wholesalers for the recovery of their fees.
This led Judge Kate O’Regan to ask whether this private arrangement is in accord with the transparency in medicine pricing that the laws seek to achieve.
The court is being asked for leave to appeal a Supreme Court of Appeal (SCA) ruling in December that the new medicine-pricing regulations invalid are invalid.
Earlier, Moerane told the court that the SCA had erred in agreeing to hear the appeal, as the Cape High Court had not yet given pharmacists leave to appeal.
He said it was the first time the appeal court had done this.
The Cape High Court turned down the pharmacists’ application for appeal one day after the SCA invalidity ruling.
Minister of Health Manto Tshabalala-Msimang, who attended the applications, told journalists the case is all about access to safe and affordable medicines.
”If we jump over certain steps [in] reaching that destination, we reach it in the wrong manner. That is why we came to the Constitutional Court.”
On Tuesday morning, the Pharmaceutical Society of South Africa’s Ivan Kotze, sitting quietly in the back row at court, said: ”Win or lose, both parties have to come to a negotiated agreement.”
Some of the country’s top advocates will present different sides of the case.
Moerane’s counterparts, for the pharmacists, include Jeremy Gauntlett and Wim Trengove. — Sapa