We know that when a product’s market price is above the Drug Tariff, it tends to mean that there’s a shortage, and competitive buying and selling has increased market prices. We decided to count the number of products each month where the market price was higher than the Drug Tariff. We did not count products where the market price and the Drug Tariff were the same, and we did not include products that were not in the Drug Tariff.
This produced a figure of 217 for April 2025, and looking back 10 years, we find it was more regularly just under 100.
Then we decided to pull in the number of Concessions granted by DHSC each month to see if there was a relationship between the two trend lines.
They do seem to parallel each other pretty closely which confirms our theory that the Concessions are just a sticking plaster to cope with low Drug Tariff and/or high market prices.
It is also worth saying that although 217 products exceeded the Drug Tariff in April, the remaining 1595 did not.