About 75% of the costs incurred by the Ukrainian patients are spent on medicine, Deputy Health Minister Pavlo Kovtoniuk has said.

"People spend three-fourths of all outlays on drugs. This is a lot of money. Therefore, we need to establish a reimbursement system. We are the only country in Europe that does not have a reimbursement system," he told reporters on Friday.

Kovtoniuk said that "these huge amounts of money must be spent through the government."

According to his calculations, about 50% of health care costs are paid by the patient. So, if the government spends about 3% of GDP on health care, while patients spend almost the same sum of money on medical services and drugs. Thus, the total amount of expenses for medicine in Ukraine can be up to 6% of GDP.

"Our task is to effectively use these means, only then we can talk about increasing funding," the deputy minister said.

At the same time, Kovtoniuk said "it’s necessary to find additional resources" for the introduction of reimbursement system that will use the funds effectively.

"An additional source of funding could be the excise tax on alcohol and tobacco," the deputy health minister said.

As reported, inflation in 2017 would "eat" the increase in financing for healthcare foreseen in the draft 2017 national budget, experts of the Institute for Social & Economic Studies (ISES) said, commenting on the expenses on healthcare foreseen in 2017.

They said that general expenses on healthcare foreseen in the draft 2017 national budget could be UAH 76.979 billion. The sum includes the subvention and expenses from the general and special funds of the budget.

The Health Ministry will receive UAH 62 billion, including UAH 58.1 billion from the general fund, which is 7.5% up on 2016. The draft budget says that inflation in 2017 would be 8.1%.

ISES said that public expenses going through the Health Ministry, including subventions to the regions were over 6.6% of the tax part of the budget in 2016, and in 2017 they would be only around 6.19%.

The draft of the state budget for 2017 envisages spending on health care UAH 77 billion, which is 6% or UAH 3.4 billion more than the previous year, including UAH 59.7 billion from the state budget and UAH 17.3 billion from local budgets.