Pharmaceutical Benefits Scheme: Issues, Policies, and Recommendations

RUNNING HEAD: PHARMACEUTICAL BENEFIT SCHEME 1
Pharmaceutical Benefits scheme
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PHARMACEUTICAL BENEFITS SCHEME 2
Contents
Executive Summary.......................................................................................................3
Introduction....................................................................................................................4
General discussion of the issue......................................................................................4
Issues explored...............................................................................................................4
Conclusions....................................................................................................................4
References......................................................................................................................5
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PHARMACEUTICAL BENEFITS SCHEME 3
Executive Summary
The Pharmaceutical Benefits Scheme was established in 1958 in Australia. The
objective of this project is to subsidize all the drugs in Australia so that they are
relatively affordable to all the citizens .Consumers are expected to pay certain co-
payments towards the medication and it is estimated at $6 if the consumer has a
concession card. It is the subsidized price of the medicine that has led to the overuse
of drugs in Australia as compared to other developed countries. With the increasing
population, there has been an increased need for medication and that is why there has
been a rise in the expenditure within the PBS. There are different policies in place to
ensure that the expenditure remains low. Some of the policies include price disclosure
and the community pharmacy agreements. The Australian Government should
consider working with the private sector and increasing the co-payments so that the
PBS remains sustainable.
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PHARMACEUTICAL BENEFITS SCHEME 4
Pharmaceutical Benefit scheme
Introduction
The Pharmaceutical and the Benefits scheme was set up in 1948 and this
means that it has been in operation for more than 5o years. Over this period of time,
the PBS has graduated from simply supplying lifesaving medicines and the preventive
drugs to a wide form of scheme that also offer access to different generic drugs of
more than 590 (Currie, Chiarella, & Buckley, 2017).This drugs are believed to be
available in more than 1460 forms which are then marketed as 2500 different drug
brands.
The Pharmaceutical Benefit Scheme and the Medicare are the key components
of the Australia healthcare system. The objective or the role of the pharmaceutical
Benefits scheme is to ensure that all the Australia get access to lifesaving medicines at
an affordable cost. With time however, the cost of providing the medicine has risen
and this has led to a lot of scrutiny in the PBS (Faunce, 2015). The aim of this
assignment is to highlight the issues within the PBS, what could be done better or
differently and the factors that have generally contributed to the over use of drugs in
Australia.
DISCUSSION
ISSUES WITH THE PBS
How drugs are listed on the pharmaceutical benefit scheme.
The medicine that are available or listed on the PBS are usually listed in a
certain yellow book and this book is regularly updated. The book also contains the
prescribing restrictions, the maximum quantity of drugs prescribed and finally the
number of repeated prescriptions (Gisev et al., 2017) .The yellow book also lists the
drugs that have been dispensed in a single year.
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