Affiliations: Programa de Doctorado en Salud Pública, Facultad
de Medicina, Universidad de Chile, Santiago, Chile | Departamento de Ciencias y Tecnología
Farmacéutica, Facultad de Ciencias Químicas y Farmacéuticas,
Universidad de Chile, Santiago, Chile | Programa de Doctorado en Ciencias Farmacéuticas,
Facultad de Ciencias Químicas y Farmacéuticas, Universidad de Chile,
Santiago, Chile
Abstract: Chile is an upper middle income country which health conditions have
improved considerably over the last decades. It has a dual health system of
both public and private health insurance and service provision, stratified by
income and risk. Since 2000, Chile began a reform of the health system with the
National Explicit Health Guarantee Regime as the core of the reform. It aims to
be a comprehensive system of legally enforceable rights to receive quality
healthcare with maximum waiting times, limited co-payments for priority health
conditions. These health guarantees approach to providing universal and
equitable coverage for quality healthcare in the dual health system. The pharmaceutical market is served today by local laboratories. The private
channel distribution is concentrated in three pharmacy chains which have almost
1,200 shops all along the country. Chile holds the third place in Latin America
where the biggest amount of medicines per inhabitant is sold. In 2013, a new legislation (Pharmaceutical's Law) was approved. Its main purpose
was to encourage greater competition and transparency in the pharmaceutical market. The pharmaceutical commercial practices were useful to give medicines a
relevance that normally did not have. However, the generation of alternatives
proposals that allows the analysis of medicines under a different vision is necessary.
Keywords: Health system, pharmaceutical market, drug policies, Chile
