Vucic checks drug prices at village pharmacy in Kalna
A day after warning pharmacies they would face penalties, the president walked into a pharmacy in the village of Kalna to see whether the cheaper prices had reached the counter.
Serbian President Aleksandar Vucic walked into a pharmacy in the village of Kalna, near Knjazevac in south-eastern Serbia, on August 1 to see for himself whether the lower drug prices had reached the counter there. The visit came exactly one day after he announced he would tour local pharmacies himself and that penalties would follow if medicines did not get cheaper. News of the visit was published at 3:23 p.m., and the president also posted about it on the Instagram account buducnostsrbijeav.
He gave his reason for showing up without any hedging.
“I visited the pharmacy here in Kalna to make sure the new, lower drug prices have been applied as of today. That is why I want to see for myself that what we promise is actually delivered.”
Behind that sentence sits something daily reports rarely name. The executive is not checking someone else this time. It is checking whether its own decision is being carried out, in person, in a village of a few hundred people, instead of through the ordinary inspection process.
What actually got cheaper on August 1
The reduction in patient co-payments for medicines took effect on August 1, 2026 in every pharmacy in Serbia, not only in the one the president walked into. It covers 742 medicines, or 99.6 percent of those dispensed with a co-payment.
- co-payments are cut by up to 40 percent
- per package that usually means 100 to 500 dinars less at the till
- medicines that carried a co-payment of 15 to 45 percent move to a flat 10 percent
- for the group that carried 50 to 90 percent, the cut is 40 percent
The package is worth 12.3 billion dinars in total. Of that, 8.5 billion covers the time-limited part of the measure, which runs for twelve months, and 3.8 billion the permanent part. That split matters more than it looks: most of the relief has an expiry date, and whether it is extended will be decided again in a year. What a given package costs at the till after August 1 was the subject of our earlier report on lower co-payments.
Why is the president touring pharmacies himself?
He made the announcement on July 31, during a visit to the Belmuzijada festival in Svrljig. He put it to pharmacies as a condition rather than a request, and for those who fail to honour the agreement he used a word that rarely turns up in announcements of this kind.
“If they have not, there will be penalties for those responsible.”
Who would impose those penalties, on what legal basis and through which procedure, he did not specify. On Instagram he repeated the same idea in different words: “It matters to me that every decision we make is carried out in practice and that people feel its concrete results.” From Kalna he added that the work would continue “in the interest of citizens, and that the measures we adopt protect their standard of living and improve their quality of life”.
The next dates are already fixed
Vucic said that from August 15 a further group of medicines would be significantly cheaper. On the same day he stopped in Kalna, in the village of Temska near Pirot, he spoke about raising doctors’ salaries in rural areas by 15 to 20 percent. State support for pensioners, war veterans and welfare recipients arrives from September 1.
Three dates in five weeks, each with its own budget line. That is also the calendar against which the announcements will be measured, because the president himself supplied the method: turn up and look.
Apoteka Beograd remains an open question
In the same statement in Svrljig on July 31, Vucic also touched on Apoteka Beograd, the state-owned Belgrade pharmacy chain whose status has been unresolved for years, saying a solution had to be found for it. He added an assessment that reaches well beyond a single institution:
“private capital and private property are always stronger than state and social ownership”
That sentence was spoken a day before the Kalna visit and concerns a separate matter, not the measure that took effect on August 1. It still sits awkwardly next to it. Over the same weekend the state cut co-payments across a network that leans heavily on private pharmacies, while its president said publicly that the state-owned Belgrade chain has yet to be sorted out. The first checkpoint falls in two weeks.
