PUBLIC PROCUREMENTS OF HEALTH CARE PRODUCTS (Advisory opinion)
PRESS RELEASE
The Italian Competition Authority, under section 22 of the Competition Act, submitted an advisory opinion to the Minister of Health and the Presidents of Italian Regions, in relation to likely anticompetitive behaviors affecting the procedures for awarding contracts to supply health care products.
Health and pharmaceutical operators filed with the Authority many complaints about the conduct of diverse local health units joining the public health service system.
Such units established quite uniform criteria - varying only with the type of procedure adopted (open, restricted and negotiated tender, call for tender, private tender) - by which specific or total sales were used as a parameter to rank companies.
Sales were a determining factor to exclude companies from awarding the contract, and even from participating in tenders. Furthermore, local health units often determined sales minimum thresholds out of proportion to the entity of the tender, or required firms to prove to have supplied specific categories of public companies, so as to eliminate likely competitors from the start.
The Authority highlighted that requiring sales non-calibrated to the real value of procurements, in relation to limited amounts of supplies, was not justified by the need to ensure the quality of the supplies themselves, which was previously ascertained by the Ministry of Health. In addition, it was not correct to consider sales as the only criterion to estimate the real financial solidity of a company.
The Authority felt that the above conduct, aimed at using non-calibrated sales thresholds to give access to tenders, could create anticompetitive effects.
Indeed, whether such procedures should be followed as far as possible, only the biggest suppliers, ranked by their previous historic sales, could participate in certain tenders. This would prevent new companies from growing, to the advantage of positions formerly gained by major firms, whose sales will increase in virtue of the above mentioned mechanism.