Medicine will chip in for import substitution – Newspaper Kommersant No. 33 (7478) of 02/27/2023
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Russian inter-institutions may acquire the right to purchase medical equipment and consumables through a single customer under an offset contract. Corresponding amendments to the legislation are now being discussed in the government. This, according to the Ministry of Finance, will make it possible to better adapt the public procurement system to the new realities of the medical sector – in the future, we recall that the Ministry of Health is afraid of difficulties with foreign supplies of medical equipment and medical devices.
The Ministry of Finance proposes to amend the law “On Compulsory Medical Insurance” by allowing public hospitals to purchase through a single customer. This follows from the interdepartmental correspondence of the Ministry of Finance, the Moscow government and First Deputy Prime Minister Andrei Belousov (Kommersant has it).
As follows from the documents, at the end of December 2022, Moscow Mayor Sergei Sobyanin turned to the First Deputy Prime Minister with a request to provide in 44-FZ new ways to conclude offset contracts (on procurement with the condition of localizing production in the Russian Federation). Moscow, as follows from the statistics given in the letter, has already signed 5 such contracts since 2017 (for the production of medicines, medical devices and baby food) for 72 billion rubles. with private investments in the development of production for their implementation in the amount of 12.9 billion rubles.
However, the law on CHI complicates the expansion of this practice: the mechanism for financing hospital expenses, for example, for the purchase of consumables, involves reimbursement of their costs directly to the medical organization. At the same time, the scale of investment in offset contracts does not allow individual hospitals to conclude them on their own, and FZ-44 does not imply that several institutions can conclude an offset contract with one supplier, and does not provide for the possibility of transferring this function to a single customer. Therefore, the Mayor of Moscow asks the First Deputy Prime Minister to instruct him to consider the possibility of granting the regions the right to conduct joint purchases within one constituent entity of the Russian Federation with a minimum investment of 100 million rubles. In response to this letter, on January 13 of this year, Andrey Belousov instructed the Ministry of Finance, the Ministry of Economy, the Federal Antimonopoly Service and the Ministry of Health to work out the proposal of the Mayor of Moscow.
As follows from the letter of the Ministry of Finance dated February 10, the agency does not support the idea of joint procurement: an investor acting as a supplier under an offset contract cannot be responsible to several customers, as this will lead to “legal uncertainty” if the investor fulfills the contract in relation to all parties to the contract except for one. However, the existing legal norms, the Ministry of Finance adds, allow regions to carry out centralized purchases in the interests of regional structures through a single customer – in accordance with the provision of part 3 of article 26 of FZ-44. Thus, according to the Ministry of Finance, changes are needed not to the contract system, but to the system of financing compulsory medical insurance – in particular, the department proposes to allow the transfer of compulsory medical insurance funds to pay for offset contracts to a single customer.
It should be noted that the need for an offset contract mechanism for the purchase of less expensive lots has been discussed in the field of medicine for a long time – Russian manufacturers of medical devices consider this mechanism as part of measures to support domestic production. Given the prospect of complicating the supply of medical equipment and medical products to the Russian Federation, which Kommersant previously wrote about, the proposal of the Ministry of Finance may receive support from the Ministry of Health and the Compulsory Health Insurance Fund (for more details, see Kommersant on February 13). However, the departments have not yet responded to Kommersant’s request.
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