OREANDA-NEWS. November 07, 2011. The Federal Antimonopoly Service (FAS Russia) continued discussing the forthcoming system of medicine compensation and reference prices with experts on pharmaceutical market, reported the press-centre of FAS Russia.

Experts have arrived to the conclusion that developing pharmaceutical market in Russia and improving the system of medicines provision requires changing approaches to regulating prices for medicines. In particular, they discussed importance of transition from administrative price regulation to the system of reference prices, when compensation prices are restricted.

The principal difference is that the existing system of regulating prices fixes producers’ prices, which results in gradual removal of both expensive and cheap medicines from the market, while the proposed system of reference prices encourages price reduction through market competition, when only state expenses are subject to regulation.

The main principle of the system of reference prices is restricting compensation prices by medicines in groups according to the principles of biological or therapeutic equivalence (substitution) and fixing general compensation prices for all medicines in a group. If a medicine price exceeds the fixed reference prices, a patient has to cover the difference at its own expense.

Such system will stimulate producers to reduce medicines prices to the level of reference prices, as exactly at these prices the medicines will be most sought-for by the population.

At the meetings experts also discussed the main stages of transition to reference pricing.

Based on the discussion, FAS made a decision to analyze shortcomings and advantages of the existing models of reference pricing for medicines in the world and propose the most efficient model for Russia.

Reference prices versus free market prices – is a method for determining the maximum compensation for medicines in the presence of other equivalent medicines on the market.