evidence: The demand for essential drugs depends on the interaction between patients' demand for health care and the choices of physicians who prescribe and pharmacists who dispense drugs. Regulating prices define the incentives and constraints on these choices. For non-prescription drugs, the patient is the primary decision-maker, but regulation of retail pharmacies may affect the prices and choice available. Government can intervene on pharmaceutical market to improve access and affordability of essential medicines by price and profit control, using reference pricing and brand premiums, eliminating tariffs and taxes, fixing margins, using digressive markups and capitation systems.[61] [...] Benefits of the introduction of price regulation are obtained through reducing excess profits earned by suppliers of medicines. These include increased affordability of essential medicine, reduced healthcare cost to insurers; reduced government healthcare expenditure; and indirect increase on expenditure non-health-related development goals. However, strict targets in terms of price control may cause great economic risk without a comparative advantage. This is because businesses would seek to be more productive by considering more efficient capital replacement decisions that may result in perverse health effects.[90,91]