News item | 05-08-2025 | 14:45
A 2-year experiment was started on Friday 1 August to make antimicrobial medicines (such as antibiotics) better available. The experiment ensures 2 concrete changes in practice. Because patients do not have to pay a personal contribution for antimicrobial medicines in the coming 2 years, the hope that these costs will not be a threshold to take the right medicines. In addition, manufacturers no longer have to deal with a reimbursement limit, which hopefully leads to an improved availability of these important medicines.
Preventing antibiotic resistance
It is important to keep medicines well available, especially when it comes to antimicrobial medicines. If a patient has to change antimicrobial cure, or gets non-optimal treatment, it increases the chance that microorganisms become resistant to antimicrobial medicines. Micro-organisms (such as bacteria and fungi) then become insensitive to treatment. And that, which is also called antimicrobial resistance, is a risk for the whole society.
Special experiment
In the experiment, antimicrobial drugs (in total around 400) are excluded from the reimbursement limits that apply in the Medicines Reimbursement System (GVS). The GVS is set up in such a way that medicines that are mutually replaceable have a reimbursement limit. This helps to keep medicines affordable. But reimbursement limits can also entail challenges in the field of availability. Or it can lead to the fact that when someone needs a specific medicine for medical reasons, an additional payment is requested from the patient.
Because the price pressure of the GVS reimbursement limits for these medicines expires, it is expected that the availability of these medicines will improve. Moreover, the cancellation of the GVS compensation limits for this group of medicines ensure that patients who need these means no longer have to pay a personal contribution to their medicines. This ensures that they do not have to change to a non-optimal medicine for their situation for financial reasons.