IDEAS home Printed from https://ideas.repec.org/a/plo/pone00/0337151.html

From medicine price control to deregulation: assessing policy effects on insulin access in Pakistan’s private pharmacies

Author

Listed:
  • Amna Saeed
  • Minghuan Jiang
  • Najwa Ali Yasin
  • Jinran Zhao
  • Caijun Yang
  • Yu Fang
  • Zaheer-Ud-Din Babar

Abstract

Background: Pakistan faces the highest global prevalence of diabetes and has recently implemented a price deregulation policy for medicines not listed on the National Essential Medicines List (NEML). Pakistan’s NEML 2023 is a direct adoption of the 23rd WHO Model EML rather than a country-specific prioritization; nonetheless, it has been used to identify medicines for exemption from price controls. Methods: This study evaluated the effect of the price deregulation policy on insulin access in Pakistan. We surveyed 30 retail pharmacies across six regions using an adapted WHO/HAI approach. Post-deregulation data on consumer prices and availability were collected. Pre-deregulation prices were extracted from published sources. The insulin prices were standardized to 10 ml at 100 IU/ml. Difference-in-Differences (DiD) analysis was used to compare price changes between non-NEML insulins (treatment group) and NEML-listed insulins (control group), with each insulin product serving as the unit of analysis. The percentage of available insulin products and their affordability for the lowest-paid worker were calculated. Non-parametric tests were performed for categorical analyses. Results: Overall, the median price of insulins increased by 31.87% (p

Suggested Citation

  • Amna Saeed & Minghuan Jiang & Najwa Ali Yasin & Jinran Zhao & Caijun Yang & Yu Fang & Zaheer-Ud-Din Babar, 2026. "From medicine price control to deregulation: assessing policy effects on insulin access in Pakistan’s private pharmacies," PLOS ONE, Public Library of Science, vol. 21(3), pages 1-18, March.
    • Handle: RePEc:plo:pone00:0337151
    DOI: 10.1371/journal.pone.0337151
    as

    Download full text from publisher

    File URL: https://journals.plos.org/plosone/article?id=10.1371/journal.pone.0337151
    Download Restriction: no
    File URL: https://journals.plos.org/plosone/article/file?id=10.1371/journal.pone.0337151&type=printable
    Download Restriction: no
    File URL: https://libkey.io/10.1371/journal.pone.0337151?utm_source=ideas
    LibKey link: if access is restricted and if your library uses this service, LibKey will redirect you to where you can use your library subscription to access this item
    ---><---

    More about this item

    Statistics

    Access and download statistics

    Corrections

    All material on this site has been provided by the respective publishers and authors. You can help correct errors and omissions. When requesting a correction, please mention this item's handle: RePEc:plo:pone00:0337151. See general information about how to correct material in RePEc.

    If you have authored this item and are not yet registered with RePEc, we encourage you to do it here. This allows to link your profile to this item. It also allows you to accept potential citations to this item that we are uncertain about.

    We have no bibliographic references for this item. You can help adding them by using this form .

    If you know of missing items citing this one, you can help us creating those links by adding the relevant references in the same way as above, for each refering item. If you are a registered author of this item, you may also want to check the "citations" tab in your RePEc Author Service profile, as there may be some citations waiting for confirmation.

    For technical questions regarding this item, or to correct its authors, title, abstract, bibliographic or download information, contact: plosone (email available below). General contact details of provider: https://journals.plos.org/plosone/ .

    Please note that corrections may take a couple of weeks to filter through the various RePEc services.

    IDEAS is a RePEc service. RePEc uses bibliographic data supplied by the respective publishers.