The year 2023, like 2022, is black for the purchasing power of the French. Inflation runs its course and continues to eat away at consumers’ wallets, in the supermarket as elsewhere. According to Le Monde, trade negotiations between pharmacy suppliers ended on March 1, 2023.
Quoted by the national daily, David Abenhaim, president of Pharmabest draws up an alarming assessment: “In thirty years of business, I had never seen that. Usually, the increases claimed were around 2% or 2.5%, there, they were multiplied by three or four”. While all prices have skyrocketed, some are experiencing a meteoric rise. In our slideshow below, check out the five products that are seeing double-digit price inflation.
Who says rising prices says shortage. According to experts interviewed by our colleagues, France remains one of the European countries where drugs are the cheapest. Thus, laboratories prefer to send their stocks to other countries, leading to shortages in France.
Le Monde cites several out-of-stock products, such as “the box of 36 tablets of Rennie orange, indicated for the treatment of heartburn”, restocked on July 21, or even “Nurofenflash 200 mg, an anti-inflammatory” , which does not yet have a restock date.
Faced with this situation, the government requested the reopening of trade negotiations. David Abenhaim remains pessimistic: “We have never seen prices go down after negotiations,” he laments. Pharmacies, for their part, are trying to make their prices more affordable through punch operations, or by offering their version of the anti-inflation basket.
