Translated material
Big retail
Inspections reveal pharmacies inflating prices for essential medications
Prices for drugs from the list of vital and essential medicines (VED), which have been regulated by the state since April 1 of this year, are still overpriced in a significant part of Russian pharmacies. The fact that the domestic pharmaceutical business largely ignored the authorities’ decision to “hold back” prices on one of the most socially significant goods was admitted yesterday by the Minister of Health and Social Development Tatyana Golikova, speaking to State Duma deputies during government hour.She said that from April 26 to May 3, the Federal Service for Surveillance in Healthcare and Social Development (Roszdravnadzor) conducted inspections in 606 Russian pharmacies and identified numerous violations in 400 of them. In 50 pharmacies, facts were revealed of selling drugs from the vital and essential drugs list without a registered price, and in 111 cases the prices were higher than the maximum permissible. For 300 of the most egregious facts, verification materials have already been sent to the prosecutor's office. “The excess of actual retail prices over maximum retail prices was identified in 37 regions of the Russian Federation - from 0.17% in the Lipetsk region to 276.6% in the Irkutsk region. In 22 constituent entities of the Russian Federation, cases of sale of vital and essential drugs were identified that did not have state price registration,” said Ms. Golikova.
The minister recalled that pharmacies were required to obtain a list of all registered drugs in good printing and place it in a visible place so that every buyer could be convinced that the price for a particular medicine is fair. However, 156 pharmacies (more than 25% of those checked) do not yet have anything like this.
Thus, according to the results of the Rospotrebnadzor inspection, the picture turns out to be alarming, although clearly incomplete. Considering that there are more than 65 thousand retail outlets dealing in medicines in the country, a sample of less than 1% of them can hardly be considered representative. It is likely that there will be regions where there will be even more violators only because local prosecutors are even more enthusiastic than federal auditors in trying to detect them. And, let’s say, they are ready to “shock” all 100% of pharmacies in the territories entrusted to them. So, for example, the other day there were reports from Yugra and Yamal about numerous violations in the sale of drugs from the Vital and Essential Drugs list - in the Yamalo-Nenets Autonomous Okrug alone, joint efforts revealed 73 cases of inflated prices.
A clear trend of pressure on the pharmacy business has formed, the signal for which was given locally by the federal authorities, says Elena Nevolina, executive director of the non-profit partnership for promoting the development of the pharmacy industry “Pharmacy Guild”. According to her, none of the 15 members of this association - and these are pharmacy chains whose business is located in almost 20 regions of the country - during an inspection by Roszdravnadzor, none of them were caught in inflating prices for vital drugs. “Nevertheless, they tried to put pressure on many in some other way,” Ms. Nevolina told Vremya Novostei. “For example, they seriously found fault with the assortment of drugs, requiring ordinary pharmacies to stock drugs included in the list of potent and narcotic drugs.” “I think that if there are price violations, it is in small single pharmacies that are far from large cities. And they occur mainly due to misunderstanding and ignorance of pharmacy workers. After all, the transition to the new rules happened quite quickly, and no one sent any teaching materials to pharmacies,” said Ms. Nevolina.
The director of the Russian Association of Pharmacy Chains (RAAS), Nelly Ignatieva, is also confident that the complete lack of explanation of the technical side of the transition to a new pricing system has led to confusion and a significant number of violations. “After the introduction of new limit values for selling prices, pharmacies must sell individual drugs purchased before April 1 at retail several times cheaper than purchase prices,” she told Vremya Novostei. According to Ms. Ignatieva, such a situation arose, for example, with the drug “Viferon,” which pharmacies bought for about 1,000 rubles. per package, but now they can only sell for 195 rubles. and no more. Since the pharmacies carried out all the procedures completely legally and invested their own working capital in the purchase of drugs, now many representatives of the retail pharmaceutical business simply do not understand why they were made extreme and obliged to bear losses.