OBJECTIVES: Diabetes is a chronic disease that requires continuing care to reduce the risk of long-term complications. In this sense it is important to maintain a good therapeutic arsenal providing good treatment to mantain type 2 diabetes (T2DM) and hypertension under control, preventing complications. We decided to assess the costs of the HIPERDIA program with medication provided by the government for a future cost-effectiveness research. METHODS: HIPERDIA is a program for monitoring hypertensive and diabetic patients under care in the public healthcare system. Based on that database, we searched the number of patients under treatment from 2005 to 2010 and also the number of doses of the drugs (glibenclamide and metformin) available to control T2DM (Datasus/Hiperdia). Also, we looked at the Brazilian price database (Banco de Preços) the minimum and the maximum price paid by the government for those drugs to calculate their total costs in the program. RESULTS: From 2002 to 2010, we found a total of 1,067,754 patients using glibenclamide 5 mg and 662,519 patients under metformin 850 mg, however it was not clear the number of patients taking both. The average dailydosewas 1.79 tablet for glibenclamide and 1.74 for metformin. In the price database from the government, we found that the average price paid for glibenclamide was R$ 0.008/daily unit (ranging from R$ 0.007 to 0.04) and for metformin R$ 0.026/daily unit (ranging from R$ 0.023 to 0.098). From January 2009 to August 2010 the total cost of this program with these 2 drugs reached R$ 1,567,145 and our projections showed that, since 2002, the government spent about R$ 9 million. CONCLUSIONS: Generics generated a huge price pressure for those drugs in Brazil and with this scenario it seems to be difficult to predict the plans to update the drug list to provide more effective treatments for this population.