unpopular opinion: most of what gets said here about prescription is guesswork
Something I keep coming back to: unpopular opinion: most of what gets said here about prescription is guesswork.
Pack sizes and presentations differ between member states, so a headline price is not comparable until it is normalised to a common quantity.
Supply notices are issued nationally. A notice in one member state does not imply availability problems in another, even for the same product.
Published reimbursement criteria exist in most member states and are usually available in the national language. They are the authoritative answer to eligibility questions that this board can only guess at.
If somebody has the same thing measured a different way, post it next to mine and we will see whether they agree.
best — the order this archive was captured in
Compared prices across two neighbouring countries and found the difference was mostly pack size once I normalised it.
Kept the prescription and the receipt for a claim, purely because a thread here told me to. Both were requested.
Nothing here is medical or legal advice, and eligibility questions have national answers that a pharmacist where you live can give you in minutes.
Agreed — authorisation is European, reimbursement is national, and almost every confused thread here misses that split.
Marketing authorisation is granted centrally for these products; reimbursement, pricing and prescribing criteria are national competences. Those are decided by different bodies with different processes.
pack sizes differ, so per-month comparisons need care
Cosigning on cross-border prescriptions. The rules exist and they are narrower than the summaries suggest.
Pharmacy margins and dispensing fees are regulated nationally, which explains price differences that otherwise look arbitrary.