Constitutional Court
15 October 2021
No KT168-N13/2021
Facts
A group of members of the parliament requested the Constitutional Court to assess the provisions of the Law on Pharmaceuticals, the Law on Health Insurance and a number of related government acts.
Appeal
The applicant challenged that the Law on Pharmaceuticals entrusts the Government with the task of establishing the procedure for the calculation of the basic prices of reimbursable medicinal products and medical aids and the calculation of the patient's surcharge. The applicant argued that the resolutions were contrary to the rule of law.
Court's ruling
The Court held that the legislator must clearly define the scope of health care costs financed by insurance, including the costs necessary to ensure availability of medicines. The legislator must lay down clear criteria for determining which costs of essential medicines are reimbursed by compulsory health insurance. In determining those criteria, the legislator must consider the need to ensure the rational use of the funds of compulsory health insurance, but may not, by such legal regulation, create the precondition for the negation of the State's constitutional obligation to take care of people's health, which is derived from Article 53(1) of the Constitution.
The Court held that neither the Law on Health Insurance nor the Law on Pharmaceuticals contains any provisions on the calculation of basic prices for the reimbursement of the costs of medicinal products and medical aids, which would lay down the criteria for determining such basic prices. It follows that the Government has been entrusted with the task of establishing the criteria in question. Such legal regulation disregarded the requirement of the Constitution to specify clear criteria in the law, as well as the prohibition of entrusting the Government with the exercise of the constitutional competence of the parliament to regulate, by means of lower level acts, those legal relations which, according to the Constitution, must be regulated by law, as a matter of the constitutional principle of rule of law.