Annual spending on medical drugs from public health insurance accounts to more than a billion euros. The categorisation commission and other advisory commissions every year decide on tens of millions of euros. However, rules and regulations of decision making are not transparent and strong enough to be able to resist corruption threats. Therefore TIS supports the proposal of Angelika Szalay and Martin Filko to increase regulation of conflict of interests and to make voting of each member of the commissions publicly available. This should include making audio-visual records from meetings on categorisation available to the public and to implement clear rules on deciding which state-funded medicines are economically beneficial. TIS also supports the idea of publicly declaring income from pharmaceutical companies by medical firms and individual doctors.
More information in Slovak.