Impact of the health public politics to guarantee the drugs access in Brazil: The program of high cost drugs dispensing

Introduction: Brazil has been taken the leadership in providing a comprehensive and universal assistance to patients infected with HIV/Aids. Several other activities involve a group of government actions in the field of drugs. One of them is related to the Program of High Cost Drugs Dispensing. Within the Brazilian Unified Health System (SUS), drugs to treat specific illnesses that satisfy one of the following requirements: rare decease or decease which treatment need high cost drugs. Goal: Show data related to the execution, financing and broadness of the program. Methodology: By gathering data from a database available in Brazil (DATASUS) that registers appointments in the SUS. Results: There are 103 drugs, presented in 222 ways, used to treat illnesses related to 285 ICD. About 700 thousand patients have been treated. Both government and counties are responsible to pay attention to the patient’s diagnostic and indication of treatment, according to clinical protocols established by the Ministry of Health (MS). In 2007, investments coming from the MS were in the order of US$1.24Bi, 42% of the total amount of resources used to finance drug assistance. Discussion: The general aspects of the program indicate the government efforts to assure its universality and integrality. Its maintenance has to take into consideration: i) increasing demand of resources by the increase of population reached; ii) increasing pressure of the drugs companies to incorporate new drugs. Conclusion: To win the challenges, such as the increase of patients that benefits from this program, the appearance of new technologies with elevated costs and the limitation in budget, the MS has been utilizing Health Technology Assessment as a tool to provide a more efficient use of the resources and better sanitary conditions. This way, the goal to respect the principles integrality, universality and equality are met and mechanisms that guarantee the program sustainability are also created.