From medicine price control to deregulation: assessing policy effects on insulin access in Pakistan’s private pharmacies

Amna Saeed, Minghuan Jiang, Najwa Ali Yasin, Jinran Zhao, Caijun Yang, Yu Fang and Zaheer-Ud-Din Babar

PLOS ONE, 2026, vol. 21, issue 3, 1-18

Abstract: Background: Pakistan faces the highest global prevalence of diabetes and has recently implemented a price deregulation policy for medicines not listed on the National Essential Medicines List (NEML). Pakistan’s NEML 2023 is a direct adoption of the 23rd WHO Model EML rather than a country-specific prioritization; nonetheless, it has been used to identify medicines for exemption from price controls. Methods: This study evaluated the effect of the price deregulation policy on insulin access in Pakistan. We surveyed 30 retail pharmacies across six regions using an adapted WHO/HAI approach. Post-deregulation data on consumer prices and availability were collected. Pre-deregulation prices were extracted from published sources. The insulin prices were standardized to 10 ml at 100 IU/ml. Difference-in-Differences (DiD) analysis was used to compare price changes between non-NEML insulins (treatment group) and NEML-listed insulins (control group), with each insulin product serving as the unit of analysis. The percentage of available insulin products and their affordability for the lowest-paid worker were calculated. Non-parametric tests were performed for categorical analyses. Results: Overall, the median price of insulins increased by 31.87% (p

Date: 2026
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Persistent link: https://EconPapers.repec.org/RePEc:plo:pone00:0337151

DOI: 10.1371/journal.pone.0337151

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