St. Petersburg deputies ask the Ministry of Health to influence the prices of PCR tests

Deputies of the St. Petersburg parliament from United RUSSIA turned to the HEAD of the Ministry of HEALTH of the Russian Federation, Mikhail Murashko, with a request to control the situation with retail prices for PCR tests.

According to the Delovoy Peterburg newspaper, parliamentarians have prepared a draft resolution stating that in the pharmacies of the Northern capital, PCR tests cost from 646 to 3 thousand rubles. The minimum cost of testing in a specialized medical institution is 1.2 thousand rubles. At the same time, the express test increases the cost of the procedure by 1.5 times.

“At the federal level, in 2020, the establishment of maximum selling prices by manufacturers for a number of medicines included in the list of vital ones has already been introduced. In our draft appeal to the Minister of Health, we ask to apply the same legal mechanism for solving the problem, including PCR tests and other important medicines in the above list, as well as to establish control over the pricing of medical services, ”the newspaper quotes the words of the speaker of the St. Petersburg parliament, Alexander Belsky.

The cost of PCR testing is becoming a sensitive factor for businesses, taking into account the proposal of Rospotrebnadzor to mandatory test all company employees for covid-19 , except those working remotely. The department prepared the relevant draft recommendations for employers on January 24. According to the document, in organizations with a staff of less than 500 people, testing of all personnel should be carried out twice a week. With a staff of 500 to 1000 people, you will need to check employees at least once a week, from 1000 people - once every two weeks.

At whose expense testing will be carried out, the document, which Vedomosti has read, does not say. However, as Alexander Kalinin, head of the Opora Rossii association, noted in a conversation with the publication, the recommendations may be overwhelming for all small and medium-sized businesses if financial responsibility is shifted to entrepreneurs. Given that the average cost of a PCR test for COVID-19 in Russia is 2,000 rubles, the total cost of domestic companies for these purposes will be at least 40 billion rubles. per month, or 480 billion rubles. per year, the expert calculated.