It Costs $30 to Make a DIY EpiPen
Medicine is probably the second best place after military where we can observe how greed and corruption are literally killing people.I'm living in Russia and recently have been involved in medical devices market here. The local market for cardiology stents (little springs they insert non-surgically into your heart to remove artery clogging and prevent heart attack or stroke) has been long occupied by the three US companies. The Russian company I invested in, made their own stent design and launched a production factory in Western Siberia. Our prices are three to four times lower that prices for the same class of stents from the US competitors and the quality is the same or higher. We fought out 15% or the market for the last two years.I have to say, that almost 99% of all stents in Russia are installed at the cost of the state medical insurance - every person in Russia is covered by this insurance, and that insurance is just sponsored by the state or local budget. The budget allocated to this kind of medical support is fixed, so if the yearly budget is 100M rubles (our local currency) and cost of a manipulation and a stent is 100K rubles then you can install stents in 1000 patients in one year. If the price goes down four-fold, then it will be 4000 patients. And this stent manipulation is a life saver in true sense of this word. So, basically with our stents we can save four times more people's lives, which on a scale of Russia would be tens of thousands of people.Here enters the greed and corruption. One of the US companies approached one of the most powerful Russian oligarchs with good ties in the government. He lobbied a government decree stating that this US company will be single supplier for cardiology stents starting Jan, 2017. So, all hospitals and clinics are obliged to buy stents only from them, at the price they set. Tens of thousands of Russian people will die each year because of the greed and corruption - and we can't do much about it.