For the media: FAS does not forecast growing drug prices

The Antimonopoly Service informs about the risks of growing budgetary expenses for purchasing drugs due to imperfect State Register of Medicinal Drugs

Due to media requests and dissemination of distorted information about increasing prices for medicines from 2018, FAS informs that it does not forecasts growing prices for medicinal drugs: the antimonopoly body has been drawing attention of the general public to the existing risks of pushing up budgetary expenditures for drug procurement due to inadequate State Register of Medicinal Drugs.

Using the current information from the Register as the basis for developing and launching an informational-and-analytical system (IAS) for monitoring and control in drug procurement may lead to monopolizing the market of medicines, distorting estimates of reference prices and significantly inflating the spending of budgetary funds.

Deputy Head of FAS Department for Control over Social Sphere and Trade, Nadezhda Sharavskaya said: “Today information about drugs in State Register of Medicinal Drugs, that forms the IAS basis, is not unified and contains numerous technical errors, and dosage forms and strength are not grouped in equivalent groups. Thus, without preliminary work of the Ministry of Health Care on ascertaining equivalency of medicinal drugs in the medicine catalogue to be used by the ordering parties, IAS may not only significantly distort estimated reference prices but also decrease competition at competitive bidding and increase budgetary spending for drug procurement”.