UrBC, Moscow, February 22, 2018. Russia’s Economic Development Ministry drew up a report on the pricing policies for lifesaving and essential drugs, the list of which drugs has been recently proposed by the Health Ministry. The paper is available on the normative acts website.

Under the Health Ministry’s bill, all lifesaving drugs need to get re-registered within Russia so that a fair price could be set for all of those. The fair price should be based on the price monitoring statistics available for the emergency drugs sold abroad.

According to the Economic Development Ministry’s estimates, re-registering drug prices will result in a substantially increased financial burden for businesses. Companies have to spend RUR 5m to 6m on average to get the upper-limit factory price registered for any given drug. A large operator might deal in 200 to 300 different essential medicines; around 23,500 drug types will have to get re-registered altogether. This means companies will have to allocate RUR 117.5bn to RUR 140bn for the purpose.

The procedural part of the re-registering routine also looks challenging: if all lifesaving drugs need to get re-registered simultaneously, the respective ministries in charge will find it hard to cope.