Costly medicines will be paid with voluntary donations by citizens.
The government on Thursday accepted the initiative of the Ministry of Health to initiate activities related to the collection of financial resources intended for the procurement of medicines for rare and/or severe illnesses which are not included in the list of medications paid by the Croatian Institute for Health Insurance, reports N1 on December 21, 2017.
Money for this purpose will be provided through payments by businesses and citizens to a particular state budget account.
A special expert committee, which will be appointed by Minister of Health Milan Kujundžić, will be responsible for assessing the professional medicinal justification for the use of the drug for each individual patient suffering from rare and/or severe illness. The committee will, following analysis based on extensive diagnostic procedures and medical indications for drug use, approve the use of drugs when it is appropriate, the government said.
The Ministry of Health is in charge of monitoring that the money paid into the state budget is spent in a reasonable way, and Minister Kujundžić pointed out that the goal was to enable patients new medicines as soon as possible and for such medication to be more readily available. “We believe that Croatians will respond to such humanitarian drives,” said Health Minister Milan Kujundžić.
In recent days, the proposal has been criticized by many who say that it is unacceptable that the government is forcing citizens to pay with donations for expensive drugs, in addition to all the taxes which they pay anyway, and that the government is not willing to find money for this purpose in the regular budget, while at the same time it finances many dubious projects from the public purse, including, for example, the acquisition of two armed, specially constructed luxury limousines which will cost millions of kunas. People proposed that the government should instead pay for the medicines from the budget and let citizens’ donations finance the two limousines, but the proposal has unsurprisingly not been accepted. The reason is apparent: the politicians know that, in that case, they would be left without their new cars.
