Healthcare Minister Venko Filipce defended the extremely high price that the public healthcare fund pays for coronavirus testing compared even to the private sector. It turned out that a private test costs about 1.500 denars (25 EUR) but the FZO public fund pays nearly 5.000 denars (80 EUR) to a publicly owned lab for the same test.

Filipce defended the pricing, that is determined administratively, by saying that it also covers labour costs.

There is a methodology to set the prices, which includes the expended materials, labour, maintenance.. That is how our healthcare system works, Filipce said, without accounting for the fact that private clinics also have the same costs included in their test prices.

The opposition VMRO-DPMNE party strongly condemned the pricing, calling the public system grossly inefficient.

This is even worse than the case of wartime profiteering with tank parts SDSM did during the 2001 war. It shows that our main problem is not the epidemic but the huge level of corruption. Minister Filipce was famously corrupt when everything was normal but nobody expected he would pay four times the market price for coronavirus tests, said VMRO-DPMNE Secretary General Igor Janusev.