KARACHI: The government of General Pervez Musharraf is faced with a challenge of introducing a health insurance plan as prices of medicines, drips and syringes, etc., are increasing day-by-day, and cost of hospitalization and outpatient treatment in government-run and private hospitals is going out of reach of the common man.

Ultrasound, X-rays and other laboratory findings, coupled with the cost of CT Scan and MRI, put an additional burden on low-income families in case of an accident emergency or when a patient suffers from a complicated disease or needs an operation.

Diabetics and those having high blood pressure or stomach ailments are advised costly pills thrice a day, and a week’s medicine bill reaches in hundreds, and sometimes out of proportions costs are incurred by families if anyone suffers from a contagious disease.

Cancer, Hepatitis and dialysis patients remain at the mercy of doctors and paramedical staff, and are often given financial assistance from the Zakat fund in major government hospitals.

The situation may have not been so alarming for those in the power corridor, but a majority of the population has still not been able to get even proper advice from doctors, and a number of them fall prey to quakes, untrained dais, neem hakims and untrained homoeopaths nurtured in far flung areas of Karachi.

Sale of substandard drugs at a majority of pharmacies in the city is rampant with reports of doctors receiving kickbacks in the sale of such drugs from registered and unregistered pharmaceutical firms.

While the multinational pharmaceutical companies have been blamed for earning more than 200 per cent profit on a majority of the medicines they market, the local firms are at the same time blamed for lacking quality. They offer huge profit to doctors and medical stores for the sale of their goods.

A source said that while the multinational companies provide 15 per cent profit on each registered drug, the local companies offer even 100 per cent profit.

By this way, through pharma company representatives, cheaply procured drugs are put on the shelves of medical stores which is tarnishing the image of allopathic system of medicine in this part of the world after bringing disrepute to the Unani and homoeopatic systems of medicines.

As doctors are prescribing certain drugs and taking commissions on their sales, this has ultimately been prolonging the regime of treatment of the patients and cost of medication also goes up with passage of time, and patients start developing immunity against certain drugs, and a good time of the patients is wasted in taking substandard medicines.

A medical store owner said that earlier pharmaceutical companies used to issue price lists, or in case of a mid-year increase, the same used to be announced through newspapers, but now everything has changed. Companies are not issuing such clarifications, and we come to know about price increase from the label of a particular drug. By this way, the common man knows little about the price escalations during the last several years.

Successive increases in price of baby powder milk have put an extra burden on poor parents who are unable to feed their children.

A large number of medical store owners are confused as to what the health authorities have been doing when they see that a pain-reliever prepared by a local company, bearing a price of Rs100, is available at Rs40. What is of concern is that such drugs also have ISO certification on their packets as well as registration No and manufacturing licence No, but who will certify that certain drug being prepared in Lahore or Gujrat is the original ones, or they have copied a popular brand.

People interviewed by this scribe demanded of the government to provide subsidized medicines to them as there are diseases in which a patient has to continue a particular medicine for his entire life span.