27 August 2019 - Health minister Bruno Bruins has warned the pharmaceuticals industry that he considers the way drugs firms are not more open about why their prices are so high to be ‘unacceptable’. 

In an open letter in the Volkskrant, the minister said society ‘cannot accept that healthcare costs mount up so much as to be unaffordable’. Hospital spending on expensive medicines rose 10% in 2017 and has now hit €2.2bn. Treatments which cost €100,000 a year are no longer the exception, the minister said. 

‘What bothers me is that we are not allowed to know why we have to pay so much,’ the minister said. ‘We get no explanation. No insight into the price calculation. And I consider that to be unacceptable.’

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