UN warning: “Irresponsible to remove subsidies on medicines”. After the new government squeeze, prices have skyrocketed. Empty pharmacies. Powdered milk now costs six times more. Two thirds of the population below the poverty line
ROME. In the pandemic, a cut that deprives the indigent patients of drugs. And in a country where two thirds of the population lives below the poverty line. The UN condemns as “irresponsible and premature” the decision by the government of Lebanon, a country in economic default for a year and a half, to remove state subsidies for a series of medicines in the face of the growing impoverishment of a large part of Lebanese society. The United Nations Special Rapporteur on Poverty and Human Rights, Olivier De Schutter, denounced the government’s decision of Prime Minister Najib Miqati to abolish subsidies on medicines.
Emergency-milk powder
The senior UN official, who made an official visit to Lebanon in recent days, invited the Beirut health ministry to review the decision and withdraw it. Just yesterday the same dicastery had published the new list of drug prices after the removal of subsidies. As the Beirut media recalled, as a result of this measure, the prices of medicines for chronic diseases, antidepressants and tranquilizers, as well as the prices of infant formula, “have literally skyrocketed” and many pharmacies still remain. without drugs. “The removal of drug subsidies in Lebanon, without a plan for how people will now get them, is premature and irresponsible,” De Schutter said on Twitter.
Poverty multiplied
The price increases of some products, whose prices have been raised five or six times, “will put further pressure on an already paralyzed health system,” added the senior UN official. In addition to removing subsidies on medicines, the government has already removed those on fuels and various staple foods. The UN says two thirds of Lebanon’s resident population now live below the poverty line. De Schutter recalls how the government had promised to put in place a system of social protection nets against poverty before revoking the subsidies, “but this plan has not yet seen the light”.
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