To Turks, most “new generation” medicines remain out of reach because of their government’s refusal to pay foreign pharmaceutical companies anything near the euro (EUR)/Turkish lira (TRY) market exchange rate.

Just 8% of the medicines registered by the European Medicines Agency (EMA) are available in Turkey, according to Cem Abbasoglu, head of the Ankara chamber of pharmacists.

“The updated price remains comic,”, Abbasoglu told BloombergHT after Turkish President Recep Tayyip Erdogan last week raised the EUR-TRY conversion rate for medicine prices by 24% to TRY 22. The EUR/TRY exchange rate, at the same time, was hovering in the TRY 34s.

The key problem caused by the still low conversion rate is that pharmaceutical companies decline to bring "new generation" medicines, particularly those based on nanotechnology, to the Turkish market, stressed Abbasoglu added.

What’s more, over 20% of the medicines that are supposed to be available in the country are actually not to be found on the market, he also noted.

In 2004, the Erdogan regime introduced a decree that separated the conversion rate from the EUR/TRY pair. Since then, officials have periodically updated the applied conversion rate.

With the currency crisis that saw the collapse of the lira in 2018, the spread between the conversion rate and the exchange rate boomed. Subsequently, during the first years of the associated medicine shortages that followed, the lack of medicines often made the news. Then the issue turned into a "dog bites man" story. The crisis was normalised as an everyday thing. The media coverage stopped.

In January, for instance, Novartis (Zurich/NOVN) confirmed that it had stopped selling some of its pharmaceutical products in Turkey due to the unfavourable conversion rate.

The conversion rate is normally revised annually in February. However, the government was pushed to deliver second annual hikes in December 2022 and December 2023 due to fast lira depreciation.

In December 2023, Turkey’s health ministry hiked the euro-lira conversion rate for medicine prices by 25% to 17.55. But as of January 24 this year, the EUR/TRY rate stood at around the 33-level.

In December 2022, the conversion rate was hiked by 37%.