A drug called polymyxin B sulfate for injection, which costs only 15 yuan, but the price of 2,300 yuan reveals why the public is helpless about the high medical costs. The drug belongs to the class B drug of medical insurance, which is produced by Shanghai Pharmaceutical First Biochemical, a subsidiary of the state-owned enterprise Shanghai Pharmaceutical Group, and the terminal sales are undertaken by Wuhan Kede, Wuhan Huihai, and Hubei Minkang, and the actual controller behind these three companies is the same person - Li Meilin.
With this drug, Li Meilin makes a staggering billion profits every year, half of which comes from medical insurance reimbursement and the other half is drawn directly from patients' pockets. Behind such high profits, it is naturally inseparable from the use of technology and business strategies. At present, polymyxin B sulfate for injection is the only specific drug for a certain infectious disease, there is no substitute on the market, and its raw material is exclusively used by the Danish company A.C. Acerli**.
Li Meilin used his economic strength to control 98% of the drug's raw material imports, thus forming a monopoly position in the domestic market. Subsequently, he found the only domestic enterprise with production qualifications, the state-owned enterprise Shanghai First Biochemical, to cooperate, and jointly decided the market of this drug.
In the process of cooperation, Li Meilin carried out left-handed to right-handed operations through his 38 pharmaceutical shell companies, and fried the raw materials that were originally 80 yuan per gram to 35,000 yuan per gram, and then sold them to Shanghai Pharmaceutical Biochemical for processing. At first, Shanghai Pharmaceutical Biochemical charged a processing fee of 140 yuan per vial, but with the huge profits brought by the monopoly, Shanghai Pharmaceutical also put forward a request to increase the processing fee. Since 2019, the processing fee has been gradually increased from 140 yuan to 230 yuan, which Li Meilin accepted, and the two sides shared huge profits.
After this series of operations, the price of drugs that originally cost only a few dozen yuan was raised to 2,300 yuan. For some patients who need to use five sticks a day, the daily cost of medicine is as high as more than 10,000 yuan, and even if half of it is reimbursed by medical insurance, it is still unbearable for many families. However, Li Meilin and Shangyao don't care about this, their goal is to empty the patient's pocket as much as possible.
According to Shanghai Pharmaceutical's annual report, last year alone, 750,000 units of the drug were sold, with sales reaching 4.1 billion. On the medicine biochemistry obtained 3Of the processing fees of 3.7 billion, all the rest went into Li Meilin's pocket. Since going public in 2017, Li Meilin has amassed a fortune of hundreds of small targets.
This year, the Medical Insurance Bureau investigated and dealt with the monopoly operation of Li Meilin and Shanghai Pharmaceutical Biochemical. The Medical Insurance Bureau determined that they were a monopoly and fined Boss Li 1.2 billion yuan and Shanghai Pharmaceutical Biochemistry 4600 million, and asked for a price reduction. Under pressure, Boss Li reluctantly reduced the drug** from 2,300 yuan to 270 yuan, but it was still much higher than the international average**.
In this process, the most affected are undoubtedly those patients. The health insurance bureau can recover some of the money lost through medical insurance through fines, but no one can help patients recover the cost of buying drugs at the expense of their families. As Marx said in Capital, if there is 300% profit, capital dares to trample on all the laws of the world. In the face of dozens of times the profits, is it enough to rely on fines alone to curb this greedy behavior?This is a question worth pondering.