Huge market
Eli Lilly’s weight loss injection – an explosive device for the health system
By Monika Dunkel
April 13, 2024, 2:34 p.m
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Eli Lilly will soon be producing fat-burning syringes in Germany. The pharmaceutical company is investing billions in this. But the project could cause immense costs for the German health system.
In Alzey, Rhineland-Palatinate, Chancellor Olaf Scholz celebrates an impressive investment with a large crowd. The US pharmaceutical company Eli Lilly is investing 2.3 billion euros in new high-tech production here over the next few years. 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 joy, the question must be asked whether the product that is to be produced here will ultimately kill the German health 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.
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 2023, doctors have been able to prescribe Eli Lilly’s 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”.
This could get expensive
What sounds sensible at first could become an explosive device for the health system. Because if all morbidly obese people received the new fat-losing injections, it would cost almost 50 billion euros, according to the AOK’s estimates. Expenditure on medicines – already the second largest item of expenditure in 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.