Maj Ajay Yadav(Retd)

₹80,071.86. That was the printed price of one 100 mg vial of Samtepa, a brand of the chemotherapy injection thiotepa. Its maker has reported a new price of ₹7,150.33 from 9 November. The figures come from India's drug price regulator, the NPPA. The maximum retail price, or MRP, is the most a shop or hospital can charge. A Mint health reporter shared the cut, describing thiotepa as an injection "to treat bladder cancer." Mint's story adds its use before stem cell transplants. Four 100 mg thiotepa brands appear on the regulator's revised list. Samtepa had the highest old price. Now it has the lowest. So why did the ranking flip? The regulator's order caps trade margins, the share kept by distributors and shops, at 30%. Each company resets its MRP from what it charged distributors this year. A brand printed far above its selling price falls furthest. A printed price only told patients the most they could be billed. The new ceiling starts from what the maker actually charged. I made a website which helps pvt citizens to benchmark the hospital costs overcharged.in

₹27,586.88 or ₹1,841. Those are two printed prices for the same cancer drug, lenvatinib 10 mg, in the same pack of 10 capsules, from 9 November. I built a page to show gaps like this. The drugs page on overcharged.in lists 543 cancer drug packs. For each brand, it shows the old printed price, the new one, and how much it fell. The prices come from a list by India's drug price regulator, the National Pharmaceutical Pricing Authority (NPPA). In the lenvatinib case, Eisai's Lenvima stays where it was. Glenmark's Glenvas is listed at the lower price. So why doesn't the new cap close that gap? NPPA limited the markup between a company's price to distributors and the printed price. It did not set one price per medicine, so each brand starts from its own maker's price. The page says "no brand is recommended over another." A price cut tells you how far one brand fell. Seeing the brands side by side tells you where each one landed.

₹300. That is the government's rate for a complete blood count at an accredited hospital in a top-tier city. In a smaller, lower-tier city, the same test is ₹240. I built overcharged.in to search those rates. It holds the CGHS schedule, the central government health scheme's price list, across 2,594 procedure entries. One procedure has many rates. City tier changes it. So does NABH accreditation, the national hospital quality standard, and the patient's ward. The site reads the published value for each combination. Hospital prices are meant to come from hospitals. Rules from 2012 require hospitals, where the law applies, to display their rates for each service. This month, the Union Health Secretary asked states to enforce them. A search box can hold the government's price. Only the hospital can post its own. @RemaNagarajan @malpani @law_ninja @anupsoans @ramavenu