The bill that Spain has to pay for the medicines it consumes continues to increase. Data from the Ministry of Health show that in 2024, just over 23.5 billion will have been spent on treatments used in both public network hospitals and pharmacies. This is an increase of 6.3% compared to the figures that Mónica García’s department published in 2023.
But these numbers will be higher than those shown in the attached graph. Health is one month behind in accounting for expenditure in pharmacies and one quarter in hospitals. Given the figures that are known month by month and those that were seen in previous years, It is more than likely that the final figure for 2024 will exceed 24.5 billion in conservative calculations.
The increase in cost (that 6.3%) is calculated over twelve calendar months previous due to the lack of data, so in the case of pharmacies it counts the period between December and November of each year and in the case of hospitals, from October to September. All in all, this is the most significant increase in the last three years, and since 2020 it is the second highest, only surpassed by 2021, a year of still high incidence of the pandemic.
Practically the entire bill is borne by the autonomous communitiessince the national government is only responsible for Ceuta, Melilla and the mutual societies of state officials. If the behavior of 2024 is observed, in hospitals and until September, both Extremadura and the Basque Country are the territories where spending has run the most. In the first case the increase is 6.63%, while in the second it is 6.19%. On the other side of the coin, only Catalonia managed to reduce the bill compared to the previous year, with a decrease in the first nine months of 2024 of 1.68%.
On the other hand, in the analysis of the invoice in pharmacy offices, the increase in spending is generalized for all communities and autonomous cities dependent on the Government. The biggest increase is in Madridwhere until the month of November it was 6.3% more than in the same period of 2023, while the region that most controlled the bill was Catalonia (4.3% increase).
The battle for control of this spending is something that is already worrying within the Government. Not in vain, and as this media reported, The Ministry of Finance is considering recovering a control tool which was in force at the end of the last decade.
It was then that the department then headed by the popular Cristóbal Montoro signed an agreement with the pharmaceutical industry that linked the increase in the pharmaceutical bill to the evolution of the GDP. If the first grew more than the second, the pharmaceutical companies had to compensate the State. During the years it was in force (from 2016 to 2019), the sector paid the State just over 420 million euros.
If that pact had been in force now, the increase in pharmaceutical spending would have been double that of the Gross Domestic Product.
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