On December 22, the Shanghai Municipal Administration for Market Regulation issued the "Administrative Penalty Decision" on its official WeChat account, imposing penalties on Shanghai Shanghai Pharmaceutical First Biochemical Pharmaceutical Co., Ltd. (hereinafter referred to as Shenghua), Wuhan Huihai Pharmaceutical Co., Ltd., Wuhan Kede Pharmaceutical Co., Ltd., Hubei Minkang Pharmaceutical Co., Ltd. (hereinafter collectively referred to as the three companies as Huihaifang) abused its dominant position in China's polymyxin sulfate B market for injection and made an administrative penalty decision to sell preparations at unfairly high prices, ordered to stop the illegal acts, confiscated illegal gains, and imposed fines of 3% and 8% of the sales of the previous year respectively, with a total fine of about 1.219 billion yuan.
Another shady curtain in the medical industry has been revealed, which is really unsettling. Four pharmaceutical companies conspired to sell imported APIs from 73 yuan/g to 94 yuan/g to 18,000 yuan/g to 35,000 yuan/g in China through market monopoly behavior, an increase of more than 20 times. It is also an emergency life-saving medicine specifically designed to treat specific diseases.
Such profiteering behavior is tantamount to bloody exploitation. The price of life-saving drugs has been pushed up by tens or hundreds of times, resulting in many patients being forced to abandon treatment because they cannot afford the cost of medicine, and eventually lose their lives. These unscrupulous businessmen who put their lives under money are simply blatantly seeking money and killing people!
Even more unsettling is that because she cannot afford to pay the huge cost of treatment, a pregnant young mother has to kneel in front of a hospital bed, kowtow to her sick young child, hoping to win a chance for treatment for her child. However, the test results aside, the cold reality is that such families simply cannot afford the sky-high price of medicines.
This desperate and helpless scene will break the hearts of those who see it. An important reason for all this is that the prices of some drugs are maliciously raised by a small number of companies.
The regulatory authorities have imposed too light penalties on such profiteering. These four pharmaceutical companies were only fined 3% of their sales, only 1.2 billion yuan, which can be said to be a drop in the bucket compared with the windfall profits they obtained by driving up drug prices.
Such a light punishment is tantamount to acquiescing in the fact that pharmaceutical companies can do whatever they want, and even encouraging this kind of behavior of blackmailing their lives for profiteering! If this barbaric business model is not fundamentally suppressed, the tragedy of patients being forced to give up treatment may be staged on a larger scale.
At present, the mainland is in a critical period of widening the income distribution gap. In basic areas of people's livelihood such as medical care, if the disorderly expansion of capital is allowed for a long time and the weak are allowed to bear unreasonably high costs, it will not only lead to more tragedies, but also inevitably lead to the accumulation of social contradictions and eventually erupt.
Therefore, the regulatory authorities must change their thinking and increase the punishment of illegal acts of pharmaceutical companies from the perspective of patients' rights and interests. For example, it may be considered to increase the base of fines and confiscations from sales to illegal gains, or to establish a mechanism for converting the value of life, so that the amount of penalties exceeds all the profits obtained by enterprises by raising drug prices.
At the same time, it is necessary to establish a long-term mechanism to prevent the recurrence of such incidents from the institutional perspective. For example, accelerate the promotion of the centralized procurement model of drug prices across the country, cancel the pricing power of pharmaceutical companies, and implement government-guided prices; Clearly stipulate the upper limit of drug price increases, and establish a monitoring and early warning mechanism for abnormal prices.
Chairman Mao once pointed out: "Medicine protects human life, and it has nothing to do with money!" The old man's sentence is in one sentence. The purpose of the medical profession is to save lives and practice humanitarianism. If even such a bottom line cannot be kept, the drug market will be reduced to a bloody slaughterhouse for capital to plunder patients.
Therefore, in this scandal of four pharmaceutical companies raising drug prices, regulatory law enforcement must quickly change the concept, start from protecting the lives and health of the people, severely punish profiteering behavior, and resolutely safeguard social fairness and justice.
Here, Xiaobian also calls on the public to actively pay attention to this matter, gather onlookers, form a strong public opinion pressure, urge relevant departments to increase punishment as soon as possible, formulate long-term effective measures, and resolutely curb illegal and chaotic phenomena in the field of drugs, so that every life can be duly respected! #文章首发挑战赛#