The price of many popular medicines is set to fall in June by as much as 90% as health insurers focus on out-of-patent drugs, reports Tuesday’s Trouw.

Health insurers have agreed only to pay for the cheaper generic versions of 36 different types of medicine, which they say will cut the healthcare budget by €350m a year.
Trouw quotes a number of examples. For example, it says, the migraine medicine sumatriptan will drop in price from €30 to €4 for six tablets and the cholesterol lowering simvastatine from €35 to €8 for 30 tablets.
The insurance companies taking part in the scheme include CZ, Agis, Univé and Delta Lloyd. Together they insure some 10 million of the 16 million Dutch population.
Labour (PvdA) MP Eelke Van der Veen told Trouw the figures show exactly how much money can be saved by using generic medicines. ‘People with health care insurance have been paying over the odds for their medicine for years,’ he told the paper.
However, the dispensing chemists organisation KNMP is concerned that the lower prices will lead to closures, with chemists likely to suffer to a shortfall of €160,000 per year.