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4000 pharmacies are about to close because of the planned new measure to bring down the profit rate of pharmacists from 23% to 18%. If the profit rate is decreased this means that there will be no profit in practice, because after the owners of the pharmacies pay the costs their real profit is in the range between 8% and 11%, said the President of the Pharmacy Guild of Greece Theodoros Abadzoglou at a press conference.

On the other hand, according to the pharmacists the new law for the opening of closed professions will increase the number of pharmacies by 1000. Greece has the highest number of pharmacies per capita in Europe, and while here there is one pharmacy for every 1000 people, in Denmark one pharmacy serves around 20,000 people. All of this is the result of the controversial government policy, said Abadzoglou.

"The pharmacists support the reforms that aim to reduce the costs in the health sector," said Abadzoglou and presented six proposals by the pharmaceutical union for greater transparency and cost reduction. Initially, the President of the Pharmacy Guild said that it is impossible for the pharmacists not to pay their taxes, and according to official data, the average amount per year in the income tax return of pharmacists is around € 50,000.

According to the pharmacists, the e-prescription system is necessary to be adjusted since it has increased the documentation three times instead of reducing it. They said they could propose an on-line programme, through which the exchange of written prescriptions would be avoided and everything would be done on-line.

The problem of increased costs for health care is rooted in the fact that cheap medicines were replaced by twenty times more expensive ones for the same disease. The pharmacists give as an example a medicine for diabetes at a cost of 3 euros, which is replaced with a similar medicine that costs 60 euros. This leads to another contradiction - despite the decrease in prices of medicines by 22%, which should lead to cost reductions in health care the costs have increased due to the substitution of cheaper medicine with a more expensive one, Abadzoglou said.
 
Last year, each pharmacist lost € 25,000 on average due to the reduction of prices of medicines, as they had already been supplied with them and had them in their warehouses. However, the president of their union said that he supports all actions that lead to cost reductions despite their economic disadvantages.

The pharmacists indicated that their profits are also reduced because of the delayed payments by certain insurance funds like the civil servants’ and the joint fund for employees in the national electricity company and the telecommunications organisation. The civil servants’ fund promised to pay by the end of April all the amounts due to pharmacists since April last year. Otherwise, they would resort to new protests, said Abadzogou. The fund of the workers in the electricity company and the telecommunication organisation also owes large amounts to pharmacists.

"The cost of medicines decreased by 30% in the first quarter of 2010 compared with the same period the previous year, as the prices fell, there is prescriptions control and a list of medicines that are no longer paid by insurance funds," said Abadzoglou. These medicines will increase in number - by 249, which will make them 1000 and there is no clear criterion for putting these medicines in the so-called "blacklist".

Pharmacists offer to introduce protocols for the diagnosis of patients where the physicians will record the diagnosis and instead of prescribing the most expensive available medicine they should find a way to prescribe cheaper and tested medicines.

It is also necessary to reduce the number of pills in some packages which increases the end price of the medicine, without being necessary to the patient. The number of pills in the packages has doubled since 2009 and now reaches 350 pills, which has increased the cost of each medicine by between 250,000 and one million euros.