2002 Volume 12 Pages 5-28
Pharmaceutical prices have been continuously cut off since policy makers pointed out that pharmaceuticals were overused to maximize the margin by getting price gap (“Yakkasa”) between official price tariff and market price of pharmaceuticals in healthcare facilities. However, the studies have not been done enough to prove the issue and the effect of the price regulation policy. In this paper, price gap elasticity was estimated to analyze how pharmaceutical demand has been influenced by price gap and whether the results were changed depending on the characteristics of healthcare facilities. The average daily dosage of each drug was focused so that the state of drug usage can be better reflected on the analysis. The transaction data between pharmaceutical wholesalers and healthcare facilities from 1994 to 1998 was used. The pharmaceuticals used for hypertension, hyperlipemia, and diabetes were chosen as sample data. Pharmaceutical demand was elastic to price gap in each disease category. But, each elastic level tended to decrease as more recently. This overall tendency had no difference based on the characteristics of healthcare institutions.
