10 February 2007, 23:19
Privileged patients of the Volgograd Region left without medicines
The Volgograd Region has faced an extremely poor situation with implementing privileges in provision medicines to the population. Having received a prescription at a polyclinic on free-of-charge medicines, the residents of the Region can expect only being put on the waiting list at the drugstore.
The situation with supplying privileged (free-of-charge) medicines to a great number of people has caused a negative resonance among the citizens. "The bureaucrats from the Ministry for Public Health and Social Development of the Russian Federation are asserting that the critical situation in the medicinal sphere stems from the fact that a great number of beneficiaries (privileged patients), who have refused from the social package of services in favour of monetary compensations, which caused reduction of volumes of funding of the program of additional medicinal supplies," Mikhail Tarantsov, ombudsman for the Volgograd Region, has given his comments.
Another problem is also in the fact that today the debt to suppliers of medicines for the drugs for this category of patients, already obtained by the chemists' network of the Volgograd Region, makes a billion roubles.
Oksana Grabarova, CK correspondent
