The War on Insulin

Insulin is a lifesaver drug for those with diabetes and other health issues. However big pharma in America has made it impossibly expensive, meaning something so important to so many people is no longer affordable. Many  are dying because they do not earn enough to pay for insulin or their insurance no longer covers it.

Insulin has become a rich man’s medication. In 2019, over a quarter of people with diabetes type-1 have had to ration their insulin doses as they could not pay for it. Certain vials of insulin cost over $300.

For people with diabetes, lack of insulin can cause vision loss to cardiac arrest and even in worse cases, death. Insulin, when first discovered in 1923, the price was just $1 a vial, to make it available to all who needed it.

“26-year-old Alec Smith, who died in 2017 less than a month after he aged out of his mother's health insurance plan. Despite working full-time making more than minimum wage, he could not afford to buy new insurance or pay the $1,000 a month for insulin without it.” - BBC news

Healthcare in America can be very expensive without extra medication. If a person with diabetes runs out of insulin due to monetary issues, they could be paying up to 50,000 US dollars for an ambulance to the hospital. The reality is, people are selling their houses and any worthy possessions just to stay alive.

No life-saving drug should be worth more than what a single person can earn on minimum wage in the country. There are also many reasons why someone may not have health insurance in America, for example not being able to afford a plan for themselves or not qualifying for employer-sponsored insurance. 

Something as simple as losing one's job, for whatever reason, could result in a diabetic person no longer having the funds to afford insulin. Many people are trying to bring attention to the insane and immoral prices of insulin from big pharma, but most companies in turn blame the government. Yet there is no other drug on the market currently that has risen in price so high so quickly.

On average, a person could be paying around $7 million to live between the ages of 30 to 70 if they were to pay for insulin out of their pocket. Companies are currency taking profit over the death of millions of Americans. “According to a recent report published by the Rand Corporation, insulin prices in the US remain five to 10 times higher than the prices of the same insulin in other countries.” - The Guardian.

The big issue is 3 companies currency control 90% of the insulin market, meaning it is very easy for them to set the prices to whatever they want. Many diabetes organisations also take large sums of money from these companies, meaning it would not be beneficial for them to go against some of their biggest sources of income.

But the issue does not stop there, because greed carries on. The prices are only likely to rise as many “middlemen” take more and more profit from the spike of insulin prices. A large amount of money is now being siphoned by drugstores, pharmacies and insurers.

The US does have some schemes to help those who cannot get insurance to pay for insulin, but these schemes are not always reliable as they can take a long while to apply fr, and are very strict on who qualifies for these schemes.

"The middlemen, and particularly pharmacy benefit managers, have been effective in negotiating lower prices from manufacturers," said Karen Van Nuys, an assistant professor at the USC Sol Price School of Public Policy and one of the lead researchers of the study.

"What they haven't been doing is sharing gains from those lower prices with patients," she told me. "They've been keeping them." - Microsoft news



This means that many people will still need to keep rationing their life-saving medication, or will be forced to use sites like GoFundMe to continue to afford insulin. Because at the end of the day, profit over life right?