[Question] how do you actually verify Apotheke
Genuine question, and the title is the question: how do you actually verify Apotheke.
Pack sizes and presentations differ between member states, so a headline price is not comparable until it is normalised to a common quantity.
Cross-border prescription recognition exists under EU rules but is conditional and narrower than commonly assumed, with requirements about the prescription’s form and content.
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.
Ask me anything specific. Anything general I will probably get wrong.
best — the order this archive was captured in
Supply notices are issued nationally. A notice in one member state does not imply availability problems in another, even for the same product.
How to compare prices across borders without misleading yourself.
Normalise the pack size first. Presentations differ between member states and a headline figure for one pack is not comparable to another. Then separate reimbursed from private prices, which are set by entirely different mechanisms. Then note the dispensing fee structure, which is nationally regulated.
When members here have done all three, the interesting finding has consistently been that variation between pharmacies within a country is often as large as the variation between countries — which makes the cross-border shopping most of these threads are really about far less attractive than it looks.
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.
Have you read the published reimbursement criteria where you are?
Small fix — those two prices are for different pack sizes, which accounts for most of the gap.
Pharmacy margins and dispensing fees are regulated nationally, which explains price differences that otherwise look arbitrary.
Nothing here is medical or legal advice, and eligibility questions have national answers that a pharmacist where you live can give you in minutes.
Apotheke pricing and pharmacy pricing elsewhere are different systems
Kept the prescription and the receipt for a claim, purely because a thread here told me to. Both were requested.
That is an authorisation question and you have answered a reimbursement one. They are decided by different bodies.
Yes — keep both the prescription and the receipt. Claims processes ask for both and never at a convenient moment.