Pharmacy change needs to be prescribed right now
Queenslanders will be appalled by revelations they may be paying nearly four times more for lifesaving medicines just because of where they live.
Opinion
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Queenslanders will be rightly appalled at revelations patients are paying nearly four times more for lifesaving medicines depending on a complicated lottery of pharmacy legislation and shopping centre locations.
A Sunday Mail survey of more than 40 chemists across Queensland, NSW, Victoria, and South Australia showed a massive gap in the price people are paying for the 10 most-prescribed medicines on the Pharmaceutical Benefits Scheme.
Where you pay $15 more for medicine in Queensland because of where you live
The difference in price is the result of laws that give pharmacists a monopoly on owning chemist shops, while at the same time preventing new chemists opening within 1.5km of existing businesses and banning supermarkets from selling the drugs.
Federal government rules also mean a new pharmacy has to be within 500m of a full-time prescribing medical practitioner and a small supermarket, or within 500m of a large supermarket.
The Pharmacy Guild defends the variations that see people in centres like Rockhampton and Toowoomba paying far more than the same widely-prescribed drugs in Brisbane.
The Pharmacy Guild makes a reasonable point – different overheads means different prices. That is the free market.
But the rental rates and wages in these towns are rarely higher than Brisbane.
It is hard to believe freight creating the rest of the mark up.
It fails the pub test.
We are not talking about impulse buys or things that can be put off til payday.
These are medicines, prescribed for good reason and for immediate need.
They are not exotic prescriptions, rarely sold or hard to stock. They are the 10 most-prescribed medicines on the Pharmaceutical Benefits Scheme.
If regional Queenslanders are being put over a barrel for their medication, that is not right and not something that can be allowed to continue.
Three government reviews found the location rules punish consumers and push up their medicine prices.
Nobody wants regional pharmacies to disappear. They are essential services in a towns that are too often losing them.
But any greedy price gouging will soon lose the support and sympathy of customers and the public and call down changes upon pharmacy heads.
That is not something pharmacies or the communities that rely on them can afford.
WAKE UP CALL FOR PROTESTERS
THE halting of yesterday’s threatened Story Bridge refugee protest is a victory for common sense.
In stark contrast to the language from authorities ahead of the Black Lives Matter rally in June, the police and government clearly told would-be protesters they would not be allowed to gather en masse and threaten all the hard work Queensland has done to so far contain the spread of COVID-19.
Yesterday’s argument was not about the rights or wrongs of refugee treatment. It was simply about the method of protest and whether it risked too much in the current pandemic climate. The police, the Attorney-General and even the Premier spoke plainly and clearly that the protest should not go ahead.
The Attorney-General backed that up with Supreme Court application yesterday to have organisers banned attending the rally or encouraging others.
It worked.
Brisbane Greens councillor Jonathon Sri was also caught up in the push to halt the protest, being named as an organiser of the rally – which the court later accepted he was not.
But hopefully the 1am knock on his houseboat door by police with the order telling him to appear for the injunction application is a wake up call to him and others that now is not the time for mass physical protests.