Yesterday, the National Medical Insurance Administration held a regular press conference for the first half of 2024, introducing the medical insurance catalog, remote medical treatment, efficient services, and answering questions from reporters. At the meeting, a reporter asked, what changes have occurred in patient medication since the implementation of centralized volume based procurement of medicine for 5 years? In response, Ding Yilei, Director of the Price Procurement Department of the National Medical Insurance Administration, stated that the Administration, in conjunction with relevant departments, has carried out centralized volume based procurement of drugs and medical consumables, significantly improving the public's sense of medical access in terms of medication burden, medication quality, medication accessibility, and treatment effectiveness. One is the reduction in treatment costs. This is mainly reflected in two aspects: on the one hand, the prices of pharmaceutical consumables, which were originally severely inflated, have decreased. For example, after the collection of artificial joints, some media reported that a patient in Hunan used a 60000 yuan all ceramic joint prosthesis for left hip replacement before the collection, with a total surgical cost of 80000 yuan; After the centralized procurement, a left hip joint replacement surgery was performed, and the same ceramic joint only cost over 8000 yuan, with a total cost of only 30000 yuan. The patient felt the real benefits. On the other hand, high-quality and affordable products have opened up the market. Previously, some pharmaceutical consumables had significant price differences between different manufacturers, some were particularly high, while others, despite being reasonably priced, were unable to open up the market under the existing purchasing and sales system due to various factors. The price discovery mechanism of centralized procurement pushed low-priced products to the user end in a "quantity based" manner. If the selected price of the antihypertensive drug metformin is less than 10 cents per tablet, the annual dosage of the selected product is over 11 billion tablets, accounting for 84% of the total dosage of the drug. The second is to improve quality and accessibility. Tracking and analyzing the use of centralized procurement drugs, it was found that the proportion of patients using original research drugs and generic drugs through consistency evaluation before centralized procurement was about 50%, and after centralized procurement, it significantly increased to about 95%. High quality drugs have become the mainstream of medication. For another example, there are about 30 million hepatitis B patients in China, but before the centralized purchase, because the new generation of antiviral drugs are expensive, a large number of patients have not received standard treatment. After the new generation of antiviral drugs such as entecavir and tenofovir are included in the centralized purchase and price reduction, they quickly replace the old generation of antiviral drugs, significantly improving the treatment quality of hepatitis B patients. The World Health Organization believes that China's intensive procurement of antiviral drugs to break the high price barrier of hepatitis B will help achieve the goal of eliminating viral hepatitis as a public health threat by 2030. The third is structural upgrading. Collective procurement promotes the accessibility of new generation drug consumables, accelerates the replacement of "old drugs", and upgrades the structure of clinical medication equipment. For example, after insulin collection, the usage ratio of second-generation and third-generation insulin was adjusted from 4:6 to 3:7. The centralized procurement of cardiac stents has increased the proportion of chromium alloy stents with better material performance from 60% to over 95%. For example, in the past, most cataract patients used low-priced single focus lenses for surgery, which could only see clearly from a distance and solve the problem of visibility; After the collection and landing of artificial lenses, the prices of bifocal lenses that can see both far and near, as well as triple focal lenses that can see both far, medium, and near, will be more affordable, and more cataract patients will be able to see clearly and comfortably, greatly improving their visual quality. (Lai Xin She)