Greece’s pharmaceutical industry has issued a stark warning over the sustainability of the country’s hospital drug reimbursement system after new figures showed companies are being forced to absorb more than 80% of the cost of medicines supplied to public hospitals.
The Hellenic Association of Pharmaceutical Companies (SFEE) and the PhARMA Innovation Forum (PIF), which represents research-based multinational drugmakers, said the hospital pharmaceutical clawback reached 80.7% in the first half of 2025, an unprecedented level that they argue jeopardises patient access to innovative therapies and undermines investment in the sector.
The clawback mechanism, introduced during Greece’s sovereign debt crisis as an emergency measure to contain public healthcare spending, requires pharmaceutical companies to refund the state whenever expenditure exceeds the government’s allocated budget. While successive governments pledged to reduce reliance on the system as the economy recovered, industry groups say the latest figures show the opposite trend.
According to SFEE and PIF, the increase reflects deep structural problems in the financing of hospital pharmaceutical care rather than temporary budgetary pressures. They argue that reforms implemented in recent years have failed to address the underlying imbalance between public funding and rising demand for medicines.
“The 80.7% figure is an extremely alarming milestone for pharmaceutical innovation in Greece,” said Kavita Patel, president of the PhARMA Innovation Forum and chief executive of Roche Greece and Cyprus. “In practical terms, it means that for every ten innovative medicines needed by Greek patients with serious, chronic or life-threatening diseases, the state funds fewer than two, leaving companies that develop and supply these treatments to shoulder almost the entire cost.”
Patel noted that the situation is occurring despite Greece having some of the lowest medicine prices in Europe, adding that the first-half data confirmed longstanding warnings that the current system had become financially unsustainable.
Olympios Papadimitriou, president of SFEE and general manager of Novo Nordisk Greece and Cyprus, accused the government of failing to commit to a sustainable trajectory for pharmaceutical expenditure, even within hospitals where spending is entirely under state control.
He warned that unless funding mechanisms are reformed, Greek patients could eventually lose access to future treatments, while pharmaceutical companies would continue to subsidise public healthcare at unprecedented levels. “The pharmaceutical industry is contributing more to financing medicines for citizens than the state itself,” he said, describing the situation as virtually without precedent in Europe.
The organisations argue that a mechanism created as a temporary crisis response has effectively become a permanent feature of the healthcare system, despite Greece’s return to economic growth. They contend that what began as an emergency fiscal tool has evolved into a structural obstacle to both innovation and patient care.
