4 December 2019 - The pharmaceutical industry adamantly criticised the government’s plan to evaluate expensive anti-cancer therapies and orphan drugs, aimed at increasing the overall health insurance coverage and reducing the health insurance cost.

Drug companies claimed that getting regulatory reviews for drugs, which had already gone through clinical usefulness evaluation, could undermine the pharmaceutical industry’s overall growth.

The Ministry of Health and Welfare introduced the “positive list system” from 2007 to 2011 to classify registered drugs into 49 groups by efficacy, and assessed the drugs’ clinical usefulness and economic value. Then, the government made a list of the drugs sequentially.

Read Korea Biomedical Review article