site.btaPM Willing to Reconsider Moratorium on Reimbursement of New Medicines by National Health Insurance Fund

Sofia/Brussels, December 15 (BTA) - Prime Minister Boyko Borissov Friday expressed readiness for reconsidering a moratorium on the reimbursement of new medicines by the National Health Insurance Fund (NHIF). He commented the matter to Bulgarian reporters covering the year's last European Council meeting.

The moratorium was enshrined in the bill on the 2018 budget of the NHIF which was adopted conclusively by Parliament on November 29. The power holders argued that this would help deal with misuse of NHIF funding and insisted it was only a temporary measure likely to be lifted before the end of the new year. The presidential veto was overturned in a December 14 vote.

Borissov said that doctors are of the opinion that there is a lot of lobbying involved in the introduction of new medicines and recalled that Romania had such a moratorium for six years. "I am ready to reconsider the moratorium immediately - if necessary after a meeting with President Rumen Radev. We can agree to have a new medicine released on the [Bulgarian] market if it is used in one-third of the EU," Borissov said.

Earlier the same day President Radev slammed the power-holders for their vote to overturn his veto on legislation that imposed a moratorium on the reimbursement of new medicines. "I believe the power-holders and Parliament in general are aware of what happened in the past couple of days: they are about to lose their human face," commented the President.

The President called the situation cynical as the vote came on a day when "only within an hour of its weekly meeting, the government took out 740 million leva, put it on the table and distributed it by some fuzzy criteria".

Radev was referring to the decision of the government to provide additional financing for ministries, government agencies and municipalities, that has become available thanks to better-than-planned public finances.

"Bulgarian people have gotten used to having everything concerning their dignity, taken away from them for years: wages, pensions and social rights. And yesterday they snatched the last thing: hope," the President said in an emotional comment.

"There are the roads that need to be built but what happens is that some companies will get even richer while some people will get even poorer and sicker. It would not have been so cynical and brutal was it not for the party subsidies which are comparable and even bigger than the 24 to 30 million leva [for reimbursement of new medicines that will be affected by the moratorium] which would have given one last hope to many people," Radev said.

Asked whether he expects that the Constitutional Court can undo what Parliament has done, Radev said he cannot say. "There are competent judges there but what I see is constitutional rights being violated and I hope our constitutional judges will follow their conscience and not the pressure [they may be put to]," he added.

BTA's Brussels correspondent Nickolay Jeliazkov contributed to this story.