Approving new medicines that hit the market is the responsibility of the EU, but it is left up to individual member states to decide which ones they wish to subsidise. New prescription medicines can be very expensive and few patients could afford novel drugs for cancer and especially rare conditions if they had to pay out of their own pockets. But, thanks to state subsides, what most EU patients pay is only a fraction of the original price, be it in the form of a flat prescription fee (as happens in England) or various levels of patient co-payment depending on the patient and the medicine (as happens in Poland).
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