All 41 items under Brazil’s affordable medicine program are now free
Brazil’s Health Minister Nísia Trindade has announced that all items under the country’s affordable medicine initiative—the Farmácia Popular program—will be completely free of charge. She explained that the 41 items covered will now be distributed cost-free in accredited drugstores.
Geriatric diapers, for instance, will now be supplied free of charge to the eligible public. The minister believes that this was an important choice in view of the ageing population in Brazil.
The measure is said to cover the entire population and will immediately benefit over one million Brazilians a year, who previously had to afford co-payments.
“We had more than 24 million people benefiting in 2024 and we’re going to expand this even further, especially in the most remote areas of this country,” the minister said at a national meeting of mayors in Brasília on Thursday (Feb. 13).
The minister also announced that the government has extended accreditation to 758 cities previously not served by the initiative.
Created in 2004, the program operates in 4,812 of Brazil’s 5,565 municipalities and reaches 97 percent of the Brazilian population through more than 31 thousand accredited drugstores.
