Azerbaijan, Baku, May.6/ Trend F.Karimov/
Prices of dentistry materials have been increased in Iran by 7-8 times as a result of international sanctions as well as foreign currency price rise in the country, the Mehr News Agency quoted Iranian labor and social welfare ministry official Reza Hosseinpour as saying.
"People pay 90 percent of dentistry costs on their own," he said, adding that the government can ease huge costs of dentistry through paying subsidies or increasing insurance services.
According to reports, some 10 percent of Iranian people are unable to pay medical treatment costs for hard-to-cure diseases.
In recent years, the number of families who have gone below the poverty line has increased due to the fact that they are unable to make big medical costs.
Due to western-led sanctions, only a handful of international banks are willing to transfer currencies on behalf of Iran to purchase medicine, which is leading to a shortage of imported drugs, Rasoul Khazari, a member of the Iranian parliament's health committee, said in November.
Costs of medical equipment have also soared, rising an average of 245 percent due to the decline in the value of Iran's national currency, Hossein-Ali Shahriari, the health committee's head, said in 2012.
Although trade in medicine is exempt from international sanctions imposed by the UN Security Council and the unilateral sanctions announced by the U.S. and EU, Iranian importers say Western banks have been declining to handle it.
The U.S. and EU have placed restrictions on dealings with Iran's Central Bank - the only official channel for Iranians to transfer money abroad - and Swift, the body that handles global banking transactions, has cut Iran's banks out of its system.
The government said in July that it had $150 billion in foreign currency reserves to help cushion the blow of the sanctions.
Officials have also sought to step up domestic production of medicine. However it has been limited by subsidy reforms which have increased the cost of fuel and electricity, as well as by shortages of increasingly-expensive raw materials.
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