Healthcare Reforms Impact Kuwaiti Drug Market

Healthcare issues are increasingly important in Kuwait's public life, and the ongoing transition process in the country's healthcare sector has led to recent controversy. In April, the Kuwaiti Health Minister offered to resign in response to allegations of shortages of pharmaceuticals.

The Kuwaiti government propagated a compulsory health insurance scheme for expatriates in April 2000, as means of curbing growth in healthcare expenditure. While the scheme currently applies only to non-nationals, there are suggestions that it should be extended to nationals in order to alleviate the rising burden of healthcare costs on public funds. Shortages have been most acute in innovative anti-cholesterol products.

This problem is related to Kuwait's lax intellectual property environment. Current laws offer very little legal protection for pharmaceutical product patents. As in some other countries in the Arabian Gulf, pharmaceutical piracy is likely to become a significant problem as copy drugmakers from other countries begin to penetrate these markets. There has been some encouraging progress, however, as there appears to be a new willingness among health and commerce officials to prevent pirate product registrations and amend the deficient 1962 patent law.