site.btaLawmaker Asks Prosecutors to Check for Possible Evidence of Offence in Medication Deficits Report

Kostadin Angelov of the GERB-UDF parliamentary group has asked the prosecution service to check whether there is evidence of offence in an analysis by the State Agency for National Security (SANS) concerning medication deficits in Bulgaria.

The analysis says that, according to information from the Specialized Electronic System for Tracking and Analyzing Medicinal Product Movements, relevant regulations have been written in a way that serves traders' interests and do not provide effective mechanisms to avoid or deal with medication deficits. Due to the way shortages are estimated, many medicines whose export had been banned until March 2022 were taken out of the scope of the ban, which brought benefit for private trade interests at the expense of patients, the report says, as quoted by Angelov, who is a former health minister.

Sometimes medicines are still available in wholesalers' warehouses, or small amounts of them can be found in pharmacies, in which case no shortage is registered, and yet, patients have no access to these products, SANS reportedly found.

Even if the law is observed, it facilitates the export of medicines to both EU and non-EU countries and makes the problem of deficits rather serious. Illegal schemes are employed to drain public resources from the National Health Insurance Fund. The analysis also shows that most medication deals between local wholesalers involve private companies which engage in intra-EU supplies of products illegally acquired from pharmacies or hospitals.