Opinion
Eli Lilly, the largest pharmaceutical company in the world, will soon be producing fat-reducing syringes in Germany. A billion-dollar investment that could produce horrendous costs for the healthcare system.
In Alzey, Rhineland-Palatinate, Chancellor Olaf Scholz (SPD) is celebrating an impressive investment with a large crowd. The US pharmaceutical company Eli Lilly is investing 2.3 billion euros here over the next few years for new high-tech production. It is one of the company’s largest individual investments, but also one of the largest for Germany, which these days companies prefer to leave rather than visit. And hurrah, Eli Lilly is shouldering the mega-investment without government aid, which is not a given. But despite all the excitement, the question must be asked whether the product that is to be produced here will ultimately kill the German healthcare system?
It’s about weight loss injections that Eli Lilly produces. They are in such demand worldwide that the two main manufacturers, Novo Nordisk and Eli Lilly, can no longer keep up with production and are building many new factories to satisfy demand. An $80 billion market, Bloomberg estimates, one of the biggest blockbusters in medical history. Obesity is a widespread disease worldwide. The Germans don’t have their weight under control either. More than half of adults are too fat and almost a fifth are even considered obese.
Weight loss injection as a health insurance benefit?
Up to now, overweight people have generally had to pay the costs for therapy with weight loss injections out of their own pocket. Since July last year, doctors have been able to prescribe Eli Lilly anti-fat injections as part of obesity therapy. According to the Social Security Code, they are considered lifestyle medications. But the FDP is now demanding that the costs should also be reimbursed by statutory funds. “Weight loss injections should not be viewed as a lifestyle medication, but rather as part of a comprehensive approach to treating severe obesity and preventing its complications,” says Andrew Ullmann, the Liberals’ health policy spokesman, to the “Handelsblatt”.
What sounds sensible at first could become an explosive device for the health system. The AOK has extrapolated that if all morbidly obese people received the new fat-loss injections, it would cost almost 50 billion euros. Expenditure on medicines – already the second largest expenditure item for statutory health insurance – would almost double. Admittedly, it is a maximum calculation that assumes that every morbidly obese person will be reimbursed annual therapy costs of 4,000 euros. This is how expensive weight loss syringes from Wegovy from Novo Nordisk and Mounjaro from Eli Lilly are currently.
The money would only be well invested if the injections had a lasting effect, i.e. if people became permanently slimmer and healthier. However, what is more likely to be feared is a yo-yo effect similar to diets if the weekly injection is no longer required. The medical benefit would be minimal, as the injections probably create chronic addicts and only boost the sales of the pharmaceutical manufacturers.
And so it would be extremely unfortunate if a company built here without a subsidy but calculated that it would be reimbursed by the health insurance companies.
Source: Stern
