Health Minister says oncological, other drugs on market under “daily” monitoring

Georgian Health Minister Zurab Azarashvili on Monday said the Ministry was ensuring “daily” monitoring of oncological and other medical drugs in the domestic pharmaceutical market, following the National Competition Agency’s fining of pharmacy networks last month for price-fixing.

The Minister was speaking after the companies were fined ₾53 million ($19.71mln) for conspiring to keep artificially inflated prices on oncology medicines funded within the state programme - a decision they could appeal in court.

He noted “special bases” had been created for the purpose of monitoring the ongoing prices of the drugs.

[T]he fact is quite clear [of] concerted actions of these companies against our country to pay much more money from the budget based on artificially increased prices”, he said.

• Competition Agency fines 4 pharmaceutical companies $19mln for antitrust price-fixing

Azarashvili added the violations meant consumers had been “left without medicines”, as the “three and four times” increased prices had resulted in "premature expenditure” of limited state funds designated for the medicines.

He said he hoped the “strict response” from the authorities would mean violations of the kind would not be repeated, and added provision of oncological medicines had begun to be “gradually taken over” by the state from this year.