Medical equipment will act as a single lot – Newspaper Kommersant No. 54 (7499) dated 30.03.

The Ministry of Industry and Trade presented a draft government decree, the adoption of which will allow government customers to purchase different types of medical devices in one lot under several types of government contracts. We are talking about contracts for the purchase of consumables, life cycle contracts and offset contracts. According to the department, the innovation will stimulate the process of import substitution in the production of medical devices. However, the Ministry of Finance, which oversees the regulation of purchases, has not yet approved the initiative of its colleagues.

A draft government decree prepared by the Ministry of Industry and Trade on changing the requirements for concluding state contracts for the purchase of medical devices has been published on the regulation.gov.ru portal.

Let us explain that in the spring of 2021, the government established the specifics of public procurement of medical devices by a separate resolution No. 620. It, in particular, limits the ability for government customers to purchase different types of medical devices at the competition within the same lot. In the explanatory note to the developed draft, the Ministry of Industry and Trade notes that in some cases the application of the established procedure caused an “undesirable increase” in the number of purchases of medical organizations. Therefore, the department proposes to limit the application of the 2021 resolution, removing a number of government contracts from its operation. These are contracts under which the state customer purchases not only medical devices, but also consumables, as well as life cycle contracts and offset contracts.

The latter, notes the Ministry of Industry and Trade, are an important tool for import substitution. Now, according to the Ministry of Health, the size of the Russian market of medical equipment and medical devices is 500 billion rubles, and domestic manufacturers account for no more than a third of this volume.

The Ministry of Industry and Trade indicates that it is pointless to conclude a separate offset contract for the production of each type of medical device. This would require contractors to create in each case their own production site to fulfill investment obligations, while a fairly wide range of these goods could well be produced in one place. As noted by the department, a similar proposal was previously made by Moscow Mayor Sergei Sobyanin.

Note that since December 2022, the Moscow government has already made several attempts to influence the regulation of public procurement at the federal level, believing that it has exhausted its powers in this area (see Kommersant of February 27). So, Sergei Sobyanin turned to First Deputy Prime Minister Andrei Belousov with a proposal to provide for new ways to conclude offset contracts in 44-FZ, in particular, to give regions the right to conduct joint purchases within one constituent entity of the Russian Federation with a minimum investment of 100 million rubles. The Ministry of Finance has so far refused to support this initiative, believing that, having concluded an investment contract with several medical institutions, its executor will find himself in legal uncertainty in case of default or partial fulfillment of his obligations. According to the Ministry of Finance, in order to solve this problem, it is enough to amend the law on compulsory medical insurance, allowing spending its funds to pay for offset contracts to a single customer. However, as a source in the Ministry of Health told Kommersant, they are not yet ready to agree to such a proposal.

The initiative of the Ministry of Industry and Trade can apparently be considered an attempt to offer a compromise solution and test new regulation in a single area – when purchasing medical devices. Whether the Ministry of Finance will approve the proposal is still unclear – Kommersant was informed there that the document had just been submitted for consideration.

Anastasia Manuylova, Diana Galieva