[Country] SE/NO/DK — Norway is the outlier and not in a good way
SE/NO/DK — Norway is the outlier and not in a good way. It is the sort of thing everyone half-believes and nobody writes down.
Cross-border prescription recognition exists under EU rules but is conditional and narrower than commonly assumed, with requirements about the prescription’s form and content.
Pack sizes and presentations differ between member states, so a headline price is not comparable until it is normalised to a common quantity.
Pharmacy margins and dispensing fees are regulated nationally, which explains price differences that otherwise look arbitrary.
That is everything I have. The rest is opinion and I have tried to keep it out.
best — the order this archive was captured in
Supply notices are issued nationally. A notice in one member state does not imply availability problems in another, even for the same product.
[deleted]
EU-wide advice is almost always wrong somewhere
the language barrier is a real cost and nobody budgets for it
Kept the prescription and the receipt for a claim, purely because a thread here told me to. Both were requested.
keep the prescription and the receipt, both matter for claims
Same. Naming the country in the first line would fix most of the bad advice on this board.
Small fix — those two prices are for different pack sizes, which accounts for most of the gap.
The variation between pharmacies inside my own country was larger than the variation I had been chasing across the border.
Push back: comparing headline prices across countries without normalising pack size is comparing two different quantities.
Is this a cross-border question or a domestic one?
the reimbursement criteria are published in most member states
Have you read the published reimbursement criteria where you are?
reimbursement is national, not European, and that is the whole board
Apotheke pricing and pharmacy pricing elsewhere are different systems
Yes. Pack sizes differ enough that per-month price comparisons across borders need to be normalised before they mean anything.
Correcting myself upthread: the criterion I quoted was updated for this year.
Assumed a prescription would be honoured across the border. It was not, and the rules are clear once you actually read them.
Pharmacy link removed. No links of any kind here, in any country, for any reason.
Disagree. That is one member state’s reimbursement rule and it does not generalise across the union.
The translation cost of dealing with a foreign pharmacy was the thing I had not budgeted for.
The structure that makes this board make sense, once.
Marketing authorisation for these products is granted centrally, which is why the same product exists across the union. Everything after that — whether it is reimbursed, on what criteria, at what price, in what pack size, dispensed under what margin rules — is decided nationally.
So "is it covered" has twenty-seven answers, "what does it cost" has twenty-seven answers plus within-country variation, and only "is it authorised" has one. Almost every argument on this board is two people answering different questions from different countries, both correctly.
The structure that makes this board make sense, once.
Agreed — and normalising pack size before comparing prices is the fix for half these threads.
Published reimbursement criteria exist in most member states and are usually available in the national language. They are the authoritative answer to eligibility questions that this board can only guess at.
private pricing varies enormously between neighbouring countries
- 1Supply notices are issued nationally. A notice in one member state does not…6 comments in this branch · started by u/cardio_endpoint_c
- 2the reimbursement criteria are published in most member states6 comments in this branch · started by u/cato_batista