It has been so for quite some time. My agency was formed in 2002. Even before that, we had a universal pharmacare program in Sweden, but not with this kind of elaborated pricing and reimbursement decisions. It was more of an automatic reimbursement when new products came to market. Of course, in the seventies and the eighties that functioned pretty well, but in the nineties there was a financial crisis in Sweden. Several of the systems were re-regulated, and more cost control aspects were built into these systems.
On May 2nd, 2017. See this statement in context.