the Apotheke thing finally clicked for me and I want to write it down
Something I keep coming back to: the Apotheke thing finally clicked for me and I want to write it down.
Pack sizes and presentations differ between member states, so a headline price is not comparable until it is normalised to a common quantity.
Supply notices are issued nationally. A notice in one member state does not imply availability problems in another, even for the same product.
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.
Happy to answer the boring questions. Those are usually the ones worth asking.
best — the order this archive was captured in
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.
Nothing here is medical or legal advice, and eligibility questions have national answers that a pharmacist where you live can give you in minutes.
The variation between pharmacies inside my own country was larger than the variation I had been chasing across the border.
Are you comparing the same presentation, or different pack sizes?
Are you comparing the same presentation, or different pack sizes?
This is the split the whole board depends on. Authorisation is European; payment is national.
Agreed that pharmacy margin regulation explains a lot of the price differences people find mysterious.
private pricing varies enormously between neighbouring countries
What does the local patient information leaflet say?
EU-wide advice is almost always wrong somewhere
What does the local patient information leaflet say?
Disagreeing with this bit: that criterion belongs to one member state and is being quoted as general.
Careful, that guidance is from a different country and this thread is asking about somewhere else entirely.
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the reimbursement criteria are published in most member states
Disagree. That is one member state’s reimbursement rule and it does not generalise across the union.
Yes. Pack sizes differ enough that per-month price comparisons across borders need to be normalised before they mean anything.
Marketing authorisation is granted centrally for these products; reimbursement, pricing and prescribing criteria are national competences. Those are decided by different bodies with different processes.
Is the prescription from the same country as the pharmacy?
ask for the Beipackzettel or the local equivalent, it answers most questions
How to compare prices across borders without misleading yourself.
Normalise the pack size first. Presentations differ between member states and a headline figure for one pack is not comparable to another. Then separate reimbursed from private prices, which are set by entirely different mechanisms. Then note the dispensing fee structure, which is nationally regulated.
When members here have done all three, the interesting finding has consistently been that variation between pharmacies within a country is often as large as the variation between countries — which makes the cross-border shopping most of these threads are really about far less attractive than it looks.
How to compare prices across borders without misleading yourself.
Agreed — and normalising pack size before comparing prices is the fix for half these threads.
the same product has different names and pack sizes across the union
That is an authorisation question and you have answered a reimbursement one. They are decided by different bodies.
Correcting myself upthread: the criterion I quoted was updated for this year.
Agreed — authorisation is European, reimbursement is national, and almost every confused thread here misses that split.
Pharmacy margins and dispensing fees are regulated nationally, which explains price differences that otherwise look arbitrary.
Correction: that is the authorisation position, and the question was about reimbursement. Different bodies, different answers.
Small fix — those two prices are for different pack sizes, which accounts for most of the gap.
a shortage in one member state is not a shortage in all of them
say which country or the thread is useless
- 1What does the local patient information leaflet say?11 comments in this branch · started by u/priya_palacios
- 2That is an authorisation question and you have answered a reimbursement one.…7 comments in this branch · started by u/bruno_dumitru