Iran's medicine crisis prices patients out of treatment
A single chemotherapy session in Iran can cost six times the monthly minimum wage. As drug prices soar and medicine is in short supply, doctors say more patients are delaying or abandoning treatment.
An elderly woman with advanced breast cancer faced chemotherapy sessions costing six times the minimum monthly wage in Iran. The escalating prices, persistent shortages, and disruptions in healthcare made treatment increasingly difficult across the country. Iran's pharmaceutical industry grappled with a weakening currency, rising production costs, delayed payments from insurers, and US sanctions, causing medicine shortages.
Insulin users, particularly, faced significant price hikes, with a monthly prescription of four NovoRapid insulin pens increasing from 280,000 tomans to roughly 1.1 million tomans after insurance reimbursement. Cancer patients were especially vulnerable due to their tightly structured treatment schedules, and some resorted to purchasing medicines from abroad, risking counterfeit or expired drugs.
Despite some foreign currency allocated for medicines and medical equipment increasing, delays in payments, imports, manufacturing, or distribution contributed to the shortages, with around 43 critical shortage medicines and nearly 1,000 pharmaceutical products affected.
Written by urgent.news from DW English (Business)'s reporting — not their text. Machine-written — may contain errors; check the original before relying on it.
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