Insights for policymakers from a medicine price survey in Rajasthan.

High medicine prices and low availability are major barriers to accessing medicines and achieving better health outcomes. These problems are more acute in low-income countries where the absence of social insurance forces people to directly pay for health care. Reliable data on medicine prices and availability are needed to develop sound pricing policies. The World Health Organization (WHO) and Health Action International (HAI) have published a standard methodology to measure medicine prices, availability, affordability and price components for a selection of medicines across healthcare sectors and regions within a country. Results obtained from six surveys using WHO-HAI methodology, conducted simultaneously in different States of India were recently published. A survey was also conducted in Rajasthan in AprilJune 2003 using the WHO-HAI methodology. Here we report key findings and recommendations from the Rajasthan survey.