Between February and September 2021 the department of health and social care (DHSC) granted concession prices to Etoricoxib Tabs 90mg 28 to help dispensers during a time of shortage and high prices. Wavedata thought it would be interesting to analyse the actual prices offered to pharmacies and dispensing doctors to see how fast prices recovered after the shortage, and how quickly a normal picture was restored.
In November 2020, three months before the concession was granted, all buyers were paying less than £4.00. This was true until March 2021 when prices above £8.00 appeared in the market. These (above £8.00) prices then dominated the market until August when prices between £4.00 and £7.99 became much more common,. Prices above £8.00 finally vanished from the market in March 2022, leaving mid range (£4.00 and £7.99) as the dominant factor. In July 2022 these make up about 50% of pharmacy offer prices and they will probably be a factor until the end of this year. Prices below £4.00 reappeared in March 2022 and will probably take over in the coming months.
The normal picture was not restored anything like as quickly as we expected, with high prices still common even 9 months after the concessions ended. However, free enterprise does appear to be forcing prices down again in the UK’s self-correcting market.
The surprising things we saw during this analysis were that the number of price offers made to pharmacists and dispensing doctors (data points) actually increased during the shortage rather than decreasing . This may reflect suppliers making extra effort to sell their few remaining packs at high prices during the shortage.