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8 days agoi dont think you understand the situation, or at least read the article. there is no problem buying cheaper but still effective medicine. but the porblem in china is that govt choose to buy domestic cheap version, which usually is inferior to the original, instead of better quality western imported ones. to make it worse, the price the govt offers tends to be way way way cheap sometimes even impossible for manufacturer to make equavulent quality (with some speculating that the latest price drop down is due to they spend to much on zero-covid policy). this is already causing problem in practice.
it’s not “it’s imporssible to manufacture”, but it’s imporssible to maintain the quality. because they actively slashed the price alot, and normally everything tend to be more expensive overtime because of economic development, so there’s even lesser for manufacturer to put into actual making the medicine. there’s an anectdote a chemistry teacher complains about aspirin nowadays wont complete his experiments. there’re alot complaints about other medicines i dont even want to start.
also the whole system is not exact “biding system”, the govt controls everything, that 's the reason why it is so cheap but manufacturer still choose to make the deal. that’s the whole point: cut.
the thrifty thing has been going on for several years, before this one, there were mutiple outcries not even make to international news. the drug procurement system has been target for a long time even among those who consider themselves patriotic (or in other word, pinky).
besides from cutting price substantially, they also replaces “western medicine” with cheap ineffective traditional chinese medicine. it’s a common sense now that you should reject if the doctor write you such chinse medicine, and push them to write some modern ones, at least “combined chinese-western medicine”. and in some case this is even not possible any more, because there’s literally no western medicine available, because the govt dont actually buy those ones, at the end of the day patients can only choose between low quality chinese ones.
at last, do i think the manufacturer dont have qc problem? of course not, but it’s not the main point, the elephant in the room is the whole system, the system dont change, the quality cant be protected. it’s the impossible situation, the govt want cheaper price, but expecting quality dont change. the whole system is not designed to cut expense while maintain quality, it’s simply about saving money.