Former minister of Health Vlad Voiculescu said on Thursday that there is a medicine crisis in Romania, not in Europe, accusing Minister Alexandru Rafila of „lying again” on this issue.

„PSD minister Alexandru Rafila is lying about the medicine crisis in our country. USR asks Rafila to urgently restart the medicinelipsa.ro reporting system, set up by Vlad Voiculescu during his mandate as Minister of Health and buried by PSD and PNL And if he is not able, perhaps the time has come for Prime Minister Ciolacu to send this lazy minister either to work or to home,” said Voiculescu, in a press statement sent to AGERPRES.

According to him, Romania is facing a „serious” problem of drug supply, with dozens of products missing from pharmacies.

„And it is not a medicine crisis that affects the whole of Europe, as the minister of health Alexandru Rafila said today. In fact, it is a new proof of the inability of the Ministry of Health and the PSD-PNL Government to ensure the right to health of Romanians. Minister Rafila has no strategy to increase access to medicines for Romanians. The medicine crisis is becoming an official state through inaction and silence. A responsible minister should react urgently and not make the Romanian patient even more vulnerable added Voiculescu, candidate of the United Right Alliance for the European Parliament.

He also claims that „Alexandru Rafila forgets that, last summer, he reduced the compensation percentage of drugs dispensed by pharmacies on prescriptions from family doctors for the chronically ill, and then PSD and PNL also invented the aberrant disease tax”.

„Once, the lack of medicines could be reported on a special website made available by the Ministry of Health during my term of office in 2016: medicinelipsa.ro. In the meantime, they abolished it. PSD and Rafila are lying to you all, including the parents who they are desperately looking for medicines for their children”, the former USR minister also stated.

He then gave ten examples of medicines that are missing from the country, but not from neighboring countries and Europe, examples posted on his Facebook page: Frisium (Clobazam) 10 mg, Bleomycin 15 mg, Cisplatin 1 mg/ml, Calcium Folinate 10 mg/ml, Ursofalk 250 mg/500 mg, Trileptal 300 and 600 mg, Spitomin 5 and 10 mg, Sabril 500 mg, Vimpat (any concentration) and Ospolot (any concentration).

Prime minister Marcel Ciolacu announced on Thursday that the Government will approve the creation of a working group to identify solutions regarding patients’ access to essential medicines at reasonable prices.

AGERPRES