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{
    "id": 850094,
    "url": "https://info.mzalendo.com/api/v0.1/hansard/entries/850094/?format=api",
    "text_counter": 399,
    "type": "speech",
    "speaker_name": "Murang’a CWR, JP",
    "speaker_title": "Hon. (Ms.) Sabina Chege",
    "speaker": {
        "id": 884,
        "legal_name": "Sabina Wanjiru Chege",
        "slug": "sabina-wanjiru-chege"
    },
    "content": " Thank you, Hon. Temporary Deputy Speaker. At the outset, I want to say I agree with Hon. Duale about the issue of affordability of healthcare services in Kenya. I just want to tell the leader that this is something that the Committee has already started and by the time I finish on my seconding, I want to just give Members of this House a glimpse of what we are being charged as Kenyans. These are professional fee guidelines from medical and dental practitioners. This is the right time. As we go towards universal healthcare and looking at affordability of healthcare in this country, we must review it. This House has a mandate and my Committee is ready to start regulating the healthcare prices. I was just consulting here with Hon. (Dr.) Pukose. I tin of Paracetamol with 1,000 tablets will cost Kshs240 but when it comes to the hospitals, you will find patients charged Kshs100 per one tablet. This is crazy. We have opened the market in Kenya where people who are selling pharmaceutical products come in and they set their own prices on how much they sell drugs here. If you go outside Kenya and compare the prices of the drugs here in Kenya, we are exploited. I was sharing with Hon. (Dr.) Nyikal also where he bought a tablet that they buy at Kshs100. He went to Kisumu and bought it at Kshs10. He went to another pharmacy and bought it at Kshs5. So, we do not have regulations at all. I thank my Committee. As Hon. Eseli mentioned earlier, there were many laws that we needed to amend and we spent sleepless nights. Sometimes we even went up to 10.00 p.m. in the night when we were doing the retreat to make sure that we deliver to Kenyans. When I was moving these amendments, I said we got presentation from various cadres. As Hon. Duale has said, we need sanity within the medical fraternity. We need to stop the fight that we have experienced. We had to drop some good amendments just to stop the fighting that came in. I also want to tell the pharmacists to be very specific because the nurses came with The electronic version of the Official Hansard Report is for information purposes only. Acertified version of this Report can be obtained from the Hansard Editor."
}