Price inflation in the health sector in Malta rose three times faster than in the eurozone over the past three years, piling pressure on families, Labour leader Alfred Sant said yesterday.

Comparing Malta's harmonised index with that of the eurozone between 2004 and 2007, Dr Sant said the cumulative increase in Malta's health costs stood at 12 per cent compared to EU's 4.7 per cent.

Speaking at a press conference outside the Health Centre, in Floriana, Dr Sant referred to a series of promises made by the government in the past two years to bring down the costs of medicines.

It was not true that prices were going down, nor that the price increases were related to importation because otherwise the acceleration in prices would have been the same as that of the EU. All this was weighing heavily on families and the elderly and seriously reducing their purchasing power. A Labour Party in government, he said, would alleviate the financial burden on the elderly by placing their essential medicines on the government's list for free medicines.

Dr Sant said that, eventually, the list, the government's Schedule V, should be revised to establish which conditions required free medication and which didn't, but the elderly were a priority.

He insisted that the price increases witnessed in the case of health, food and clothes were not justified. The government had to establish the cause for these increases.

Dr Sant said he expected that last week's meeting of the Malta Council for Economic and Social Development would establish how the institutional elements to analyse such prices could be improved.

The government reacted to Dr Sant's claims and insisted his conclusions were completely mistaken as the price increases in Malta compared favourably with those in several EU countries.

Dr Sant was trying to deceive when he used the overall costs in the health sector to measure the prices of medicines because this incorporated numerous products and services, such as medical equipment, which the government provided for free.

"His argument that the price increase for medicines tripled is mistaken because it's built on an incorrect use of statistics. Apart from this, the price of several medicines has even gone down," the government said.