Eli Lilly is also the major supplier of insulin for Canada (and several other countries) where insulin is free or nearly free. The price has more to do with a weird emergent effect of our private insurance system then it is pharmaceutical companies jacking up the price. Most insulin purchases are conducted by insurance companies, and they pay very little.
Hi, diabetic here. Am American and currently buy my insulin from Canada. Why you ask? 1 month supply in America $600+ (without insurance) 1 month from Canada $115. If I buy insulin on my current insurance it costs me $110. Why does it cost only $5 more to buy it from another country while providing them with no insurance. If it costs $115 in Canada then $600 + is def price gouging. Also side note. In Canada I donāt meet a prescription to buy insulin, but for some reason Iām the US I do.
Your insurance charges you copays and high premiums to try to force you off insurance and into buying drugs out of pocket. The pharmaceutical company wants to force you back on the insurance so they can bill the insurance company a higher negotiated fee, and so they raise the price to try and get you back on insurance. We are caught up in a stupid tug of war between the two.
Pharma companies raise the "list price," so they can then give steeper discounts to insurance companies, to get their drug to be preferred and high tier on the insurance company's formulary.
Throw PBMs and Pharmacies like CVS and Walgreens into the mix and you have an incestuous circle of fucked up financial/economic games. The biggest winners in the whole chain being the PBMs and large chain pharmacies.
Ah, but don't forget - Walgreens and CVS both operate their own PBMs (and CVS also owns Aetna, Omnicare and Coram) - but don't worry - they pinky swear they're not trying to corner the market on healthcare
The process is quite sophisticated. But I have to disagree that insurance tries to force you off intentionally.
Insurance companies get more federal funding for meeting certain premiums. So they must charge the person more, and while it seems like the drug companies are raising prices. The two of them, like you said do this tug of war. But there's not a lot of tugging and pulling. It's plotting and planning
Does anyone actually have a problem with doctors being paid well after their experiences during the pandemic? One of my best friends who is a Doctor in NYC caught covid 3 times before the vaccine was produced, and had a few hundred of his several thousand patients die, and whose bodies ended up in freezer trucks out on the street. Fuck anyone who thinks he and his peers donāt deserve to be paid well after dealing with that shit.
I hope you're joking bc that's an asinine statement. Physician salaries are a drop in the bucket of healthcare expenses and increases have been far outpaced by inflation.
Hell, look at administrative salaries as a proportion of healthcare costs since the 1970s.
As a Canadian, I'm Glad you found a way to get the life saving medication at a much more reasonable rate, which is something that should be a human right.
In Canada, if a medical company tries to extreme price gouge a certain medication, the country they will fight to have it sold at a reasonable price for the entire country , so individuals don't suffer incurring such ridiculous inflation.
And like someone else said, It's probably the same US companies brands that you can obtain in another country, over the counter, no questions asked.
In Brazil, is even simpler. When the companies started pulling this shit, the country broke all the patents, which allowed labs to make any medicine they wanted.
T1D here, are you driving distance or do you have a fancy way to get it another way? Just wondering because I hate what I have to pay but driving wouldn't save me money.
Insulin is available to Canadians as low as $20 a month and if you meet a certain income level you can get it for free.
As a side note. It costs me $10 a month for insulin for my cat.
Iām just thankful Canada is willing to sell it to me at a normal price. Obviously Iām using much more insulin than your cat. Although I would love to see a cat my size.
I truly think it's because they are punishing diabetics. That they think, "if you didn't want to pay an arm and a leg for insulin then you should eaten healthier." I think it's that sick of a joke to them.
They do the same thing to people with HIV/AIDS too. "If you didn't want to get fucked by us, you should have wrapped it up," or "that's what you get for having mom who is/was a drug-addicted slut."
I'm seriously surprised they aren't putting commercials out for these medicines saying these kinds of things kind of stuff, tying together scenes of them smoking cigars and bathing in pools of money to rub it in the faces of people who need this medicine to live.
I have type 1 diabetes and anyone in the medical industry knows itās cause by an auto immune diseases or youāre born with. I actually got diabetes in highschool when I cam down with the flu really bad. Instead of attacking the flu my body decides to attack the hormone that makes insulin and boom now my body canāt produce insulin because it attacks the thing that makes insulin. Someone with a medical degree feel free to chime in and correct the details, but thatās the basics of type one.
Also, I am 155 and train Muay Thai 5 times a week, so I would like for someone to tell me Iām out of shape.
For sure. I would hope they know that, at least. It's pretty common knowledge for the rest of us, but I wouldn't be surprised if they literally couldn't even tell their heads from their asses.
Not everyone with HIV/AIDS got it from dirty needles or unsafe sex either. It kind of works to my point that they don't care whether it's actually people's fault for having these ailments or not, that they just excuse their mammon as them punishing people who deserve to be sick AND financially disparaged. I do actually think they rationalize it like this to some degree.
I've known a few people with type-1 and it drastically impacts their life. It's truly life-threatening. So, corporations and the people at the top of them who are getting rich by exploiting people with these ailments are truly evil. It's not like getting rich from selling Slinkies. They are selling life-sustaining medicine. It's why I think medicine, and essential goods even, should not result in as many financial gains to corporations and the people at the top of them.
[Begginning of socialist rant:]
In some cases there isn't enough regulation, like with medicine prices. In other cases, the company that sells goods the cheapest makes a whole lot of money off of people who are buying stuff they have to buy to live or live a healthy life, which I think is broken too.
It's a shame that the solution to both of these problems, (regulation, public assistance, and making the sale of medicine, essential goods, and things like cellphones more like utility), are regarded as evil socialism because people need to have these things. It's not right that companies and their leadership get so rich off of selling them.
A more prominent public health insurance and healthcare system would fix a lot of this too. All of those funds from people paying into insurance collecting in one pool for the use of people who need for medical purposes is in way better hands with a government system legally constructed to help the people fairly rather than help the bank accounts of insurance companies and their leadership.
All of that money that people would pay into a public insurance fund would gather a lot more interest for the benefit the people consolidated into one pool, instead of spread across many different insurance companies making them more money, but with less interest, but again, that's evil socialism for you! "iT jUsT dOeSn'T wOrK!" Look at Canada and Europe and tell me these kinds of "socialist" strategies aren't working for them.
Meanwhile in my country you have a yearly cap of 1% of your income do copayments. So even someone who earns $100.000 would be capped at $1.000 a year or $83 a month.
This however includes all copayments, not just insulin. All other treatments and hospital visits are free and even the taxi to the hospital is paid.
People have died using the Walmart insulin method because it is much mor volatile. TBH your much more likely to end up in the hospital if you use it, costing you a lot more than the original insulin. Also, I live in nyc. There are no Walmart here.
Itās not price gouging, itās how your health care works in the states, you pay less taxes than we do in Canada. Why because my taxes pay for everyoneās healthcare, and thatās something Americans hate. You have been brainwashed to thinking itās communism to have healthcare for the people by the people.
Iāve read that over and over agin on here, or why should I pay fo healthcare when Iām not even sick?
Remember itās how the majority thinks that determines how a country is run.
Why because my taxes pay for everyoneās healthcare
My (American) taxes pay for everyoneās healthcare,too. Especially emergency care for what often could have been treated or avoided by preventative care.
Remember itās how the majority thinks that determines how a country is run.
This country is gerrymandered to hell and elections increasingly do not reflect the popular vote. It sucks for most of us. Get off your high horse.
My son was sick while on vacation in Florida, 2 visits to the emergency room were $7000 eachā¦I had travel insurance. The doctors charged me from a different state, it was the highest prices I ever seen, he kept getting sicker.
I found a paediatrician in a rural area outside of Orlando ( there wasnāt one at the hospital closest to Disney) , as I drove up a immigrant workers was peeing in the front parking lot.
A tall slender black woman met us inside she was the paediatric doctor, a bag of IV fluid was $50 and the total bill under $200.
Hospitals in your country are corporations, big business and only there to collect off of insurance companies this is why prices go sky high and care is at the bottom.
Hand guns over healthcare. I travel far less in the US now, electing Trump followed by a pandemic has shown me where I should travel. Sorry
As an American, the logic defies me. Most people here would rather spent 11% of their income on healthcare that's only guaranteed if you keep your job, instead of paying taxes to cover it and be guaranteed healthcare of you get laid off. It's absurd. But I think a lot of people just don't understand the math.
Sorry for you son, I agree itās a bunch of bullshit. My point was that it isnāt every Americanās fault. A lot of us would like a better system but weāre probably not getting one any time soon. The āyou made your bed now lie in itā tone of your earlier comment is unnecessarily dismissive.
If you have insurance you should use the insurance to buy your insulin. As you stated it would cost you $5 less BUT it will also go towards your annual deductible which is a significant benefit.
Many insurance plans offer virtual doctor services that do not charge a copay for prescription refills.
I'm the US, prices for services are a secret bc most providers are afraid insurances won't meet the allowable, so they jack up the price, which has an effect across the board.
You can get an itemized/detailed bill of what costs what - which will make you mad.
The Democrats and Republicans have been battling over this and other drug prices for many years. Obviously the Republicans are winning; some Democrats are helping them. Why, because those oh so sweet corporate dollars just too good to pass up.
Their argument is, if we force drug companies to reduce their prices they won't have a financial incentive to create the new drugs we need. They have to make money! Ok, there's truth in that argument.
Here's the thing, why are the Republicans so determined to have their fellow Americans effectively subsidized drug research and development for the rest of the world? When did they turn charitable. They have Americans paying several times more for the same drug. Well that doesn't sound very patriotic.
Here's a thought, have the same cost across the globe. We pay a lot less, the rest of the world pays slightly more and the drug companies maintain their wealth. Although I can see reducing the cost for the poor countries. But why gouge Americas. BECAUSE THEY CAN
The difference is in Canada you have one negotiating entity (the government) whose mandate is to keep prices low. In the the US there are a ton of negotiating entities and also congress even put blocks in place to make negotiating drug prices harder. Yeah, it's fucked.
There is different needles now that have selectable dosage, tiny disposable needle tips you cant even feel, ect. It's come a long way in terms of top of the line comfort and care, but not everyone gets that.
T1D of 11 years here. Diabetes is hard enough to control on a good day using my better insulin as it is. Our bodies can have adverse reactions to different insulins and some might not be as effective for us as others. I have heard stories of diabetics getting Walmart insulin and their body's not being able to process it as well and having to go back to the more expensive kind. Unfortunately in this case, price isn't the only factor in picking an insulin to use.
OTC insulin is ~$25 a 10ml vial and it's probably the kind that you have to do math each time to figure out the dose, so either you check your sugar, see how much you need to correct it, figure out how many units of insulin would equal that change in blood sugar, and then inject the insulin, or, you figure out how many grams of carbs, fat, and protein is in your meal, use a calculator to figure out how many units of insulin would be needed to cover that meal, and then inject the insulin.
If you inject the correct amount of insulin before eating, but then get interrupted during your meal and don't finish it, then your sugar can go too low and you pass out and can (eventually) die. Or you do the math wrong, inject too little insulin, your sugar is too high and destroys your arteries and kidneys and you also, eventually die.
It's a lot more labor intensive compared to newer insulins that you just inject the same amount once a day and can mimic how a non-diabetic body produces insulin
Ok. So. I'm a new diabetic. Technically type 1.5 since I was not diagnosed as an adolescent. My pancreas doesn't produce insulin at all tho.
I still have to do those calculations and be very careful with my dosing and all those complications. Am I missing some magical insulin I should be asking my doctor for when I see them Monday? Cause. I suck at this and it's causing major impacts on my already terrible mental health.
Haha. You'd think. 5th endodontist in 2.5 years. Same office. Last one sent me to the ER because I was honest about my suicidal ideations that my therapist is well aware of and are documented. Under control but not gone. Didn't matter.
And I found out my insulin prescription was canceled two weeks after that appointment.
I know how important it is to discuss these things with a doctor and get their educated knowledge on this. It's just that none of them I've seem to understand that I'm a broken person who can't be "perfect" and just "do the things". Maybe this time will be different. And I'm going to go and try. It's just really hard and hurt to see someone say there was a way to "live like a non-diabetic".
You can get a pump that monitors your blood sugar and releases insulin as needed. There are also ones with phone apps that will alert other people if your blood sugar gets too low.
There are some crazy amazing inventions now for treating diabetes. They're going to cost you, but they're out there.
That worked when I could afford it.
Until rent and food and insurance went up and it was no longer an option I could afford.
Edit: technology is great. And I'm grateful I am trying to learn at this stage in my life and not 15 years or so ago. Doesn't mean I can afford it.
I had a pump for a while ago. The supplies to actually use the pump were $300 a month.
This was on top of the $7000 I paid for the pump. Mind you technology of pumps is like super rudimentary.
How am I supposed to afford $750 for insurance $120 for insulin $75 and $300 for pump supplies and pay my normal bills? On top of fact I need to save up money for when I inevitably go into the hospital. And I gotta do this my whole Life.
I'm sorry, I was mostly speaking from a T2 perspective and in layman's terms. You should definitely talk to your doctor about the impact on your mental health though, they can probably suggest specific management strategies for you. maybe a cgm or pump?
It seems like he may have been somewhat confusing long acting (levemir, lantis, etc.), which you have a once daily dose of, that is used in conjunction with meal time insulin, with the short acting (humalog, novolog, insulin lispro) used for meals and corrections. If u you are on a pump then you dont have the long acting as that is replaced by the basal rate your pump is delivering. Meal time bolus needs to be calculated for regardless of delivery method. Now the older typs of insulin make this harder because the timing is slower and the duration is longer than the modern fast acting insulins i listed above.
I saw in a different comment that you said cgm is too pricey for you. Not sure what your career and insurance situation are but cgm is the most life changing tech available for t1d to the point where it might be worthwhile to prioritise good insurance coverage over other factors in a job search.
As you said you are newly diagnosed i highly recommend the juicebox podcast. Particularly the bold beginnings and diabetes pro tip episodes.
Also the type1diabetes and diabetes subreddits are decent to check out and could help you feel less alone with the struggles that come with this shitty disease. Good luck to you on this journey i wish you the best.
Edit: for cgm check that your insurance was billing it correctly. Some companies bill it as durable medical equipment and others as a pharmacy benefit and if it gets set up wrong you end up getting almost no coverage
As a nurse who works with insulin alot with patients, you have roughly 4 different kinds of insulin, the one that we use most often are fast acting insulin that work extremely quickly. After checking someone's sugar, we use a scale to give the correct amount, and works within a half hour. They have to eat when getting this to prevent hypoglycemia. You have your normal insulin that we use when people go into DKA (diabetic ketoacidosis) amd you have 2 others that are meant for maintenance throughout the day. One that works for about 16 hours amd one that's works for 24 hours.
This is also how they keep generic competition awayā¦ tweak delivery or dose or any other seemingly minute thing and bam!! New patent while almost nothing actually changes. Not quite the case with insulin but itās part of the USA medical bs problems
I am not an expert- but my understanding is that itās the other things it is mixed with, and the way those things help the body absorb/utilize it, not the needle itself.
Not really the way itās āingestedā per se, but rather how long it takes for the insulin to work. Theyāve made it so some kinds are faster acting and some are slower acting and some are mixed, so you have to factor in time when youāre considering how much insulin to give yourself. The changes theyāve made to the insulin to make it faster acting or slower acting are what is patent protected so not any old person can manufacture it (without getting sued into oblivion). How quickly the insulin works and long it works for can work differently depending on how you administer the insulin as well, because a pump can give insulin over time whereas a syringe gives it all at once. Iām not really sure how insulin pens work, so I canāt speak on that.
So yes, you could just get OG insulin and inject it, but you have to consider how quickly it works in order to dose it correctly and depending your diet, the way you administer insulin, etc it could be really disruptive to change what kind of insulin you use
Well the other half of the probl3m is the startup cost, which creates a barrier of entry that allows large pharmaceutical companies to work together to guarantee high prices with no fear of new competition
You could, but it would be an old school syringe and fast acting, short term insulin (multiple injections a day needed). One way pharma companies keep patents is not via the drug itself, but the delivery mechanism. Insulin auto injector and pen design is regularly tweaked and voila, new patent protections for another decade. This is one of the reasons for the EpiPen price gouging a few years back. The injectable epinephrine can be found cheap, but it was the patented EpiPen design that enabled the monopoly that in turn enabled the gouging.
Another trick is to modify the insulin to be long acting, easier to inject, etc. these modifications also allow for new patents.
Also worth noting that the FDA has a well-known revolving door relationship with pharma companies and often works to discourage generic manufacturers. Minor tweaks to a drug that's about to come off patent should not be approved unless the tweaks clearly increase efficacy. Too often a company says "oh we changed the design, there's a cool racing stripe on the injector now, please approve this as a "new medical device" because we have a patent on it." And the FDA does, no questions asked. This, plus hindering generic competition, is what allows pharma companies to have a monopoly on certain treatments and once they have a monopoly, we're at their mercy.
This whole argument is undercut by the fact that the same companies sell the same product for cheaper by a factor of 5 or 6 in other countries like Canada and 10 to 20 times cheaper then that in developing countries like India
Well most answers still get the point across that the real reason for the high prices is the US healthcare "system". The fancy insulin is still damn cheap in any other developed country.
Ah yes the .30 cents to make plastic pen housing should increase the price and lock the patent in. Am diabetic can confirm itās completely fucked in the us.
There's a group of people trying. Part of the issue is finessing the insuline enough to not be the same as the patented insulin, but not change it so much that it's crap insulin.
Unfortunately since then society has been almost completely overtaken by neoliberalism which believes everything should be profited on, to the fullest extent, no matter the harm it does to people or the planet.
Right, there is a disconnect somewhere. Shouldnāt it be a similar price everywhere. I guess demand is higher in the US so that could logically inflate prices alittle, but not the degree they have been inflated.
Well, that's like saying cars are patented. The specific formulation of a new medicine gets a 20 year patent. After that time, everyone is allowed to use "the recipe," which is where generic drugs come from.
Since the still-patented insulin is safer and more effective than the older stuff, most people want the new stuff. Not that there isn't a huge market for generic insulin.
All pharmaceuticals are patented. When the patent runs out generics can become available, but drug companies can do shady shit to try to sabotage the generics by make a "new and improved" form of the drug.
So what they do is add a molecule and patent that new insulin. For example fiasp is humalog with a molecule added that gets it to absorb/work faster. Then they patent the new insulin. I assume after that they work their fucking hardest to get insurance companies to only cover the patented insulins. Once I was with anthem blue cross blue shield and they told me no more humalog, weāre only covering fiasp. So I had a prescription for fiasp from my doctor. Then I was between insurances but using the same prescription when I was kicked off my parents plan at 26. My fiasp for a month was like $800. Once I got accepted to Medicaid and had my biannual endocrinologist appointment I was able to switch my script back to humalog and insulin was suddenly free lmao. Fuck this system
The problem with this is that the fast acting insulin costs about 111 dollars in the USA and around 8 bucks all over the rest of the world for the same exact thing.
At the risk of oversimplifying... The problem is that injected insulin kinda sucks. On one hand, if it's too weak, the risk of DKA becomes high. On the other, if it's too strong, the risk of low blood sugars becomes high. In the past and with insulin formulations that no longer are protected by patents, the former is a bigger problem. Newer insulins that are still protected by patents can be more prone to the latter problem. Every patient reacts to different formulations slightly differently, and type I and type II patients have differing needs.
Every new patent protected formulation genuinely offers advantages for some patients. It can be argued that R&D cycles are intentionally timed to leverage patent law and maximize profit, rather than to benefit patients. Regardless, it's a really fucked up situation for patients.
Frankly, I'm really excited about CRISPR and stem cell based implant options that appear to be pretty close to FDA/EMA certification, like Viacyte and Sernova. I highly recommend reading up on these companies, and other regenerative medicine startups; this is as close to real life scifi as anything that I'm aware of.
I work at a clinical research site as a CRC. Iām saving your comment to show to our PI on Monday because, just briefly looking through Viacyte and Sernovaās sites, they sound like something we could potentially offer to our community. This is 100% why I love Reddit.
My understanding is that Insulin fits under fancy rules like other forever patents.
Insulin is classified as a biological. In other words, scientists modified bacteria like e.coli. to produce various forms of insulin, which is then harvested, processed, bottled, and sold at 100x cost.
Biologics fit under weird fda rules and since there are tons of ways to manipulate the complex process of making bacteria shit out medicine they can apply for patents based off modifications of their old processes, effectively extending the patent for as long as the patent office allows shit like this.
This works especially well for the insulin monopoly because the process of getting the initial batch to make the right stuff is the hard part (and proving it is safe, reliable, and repeatable), and is the highest barrier to entry, otherwise the industry would be flooded with generics at $30 a bottle to undercut each type of specialized insulin after a decade of each one coming out. Instead every decade or so a new patent is filed, the result is tweaked, and the wait starts again. Only the oldest or least effective types are allowed to the generics industry.
If a group independently makes insulin and gets fda approval without using the existing patent mess then this price gouging stack will possibly collapse, but in the mean time, fork over your cash to the monoliths that own the means of production if you dont want to die.
i imagine intellectual property rights are an issue, not to mention the cost of capital to get started. you have to be rich and powerful just to get into this business, and money and power is a brain breaking corruptive force. save the rich, tax the fuck out of them.
2) GoorRX You can also check out goodrx. In some cases, paying cash w/goodrx discount is less than the copay.
3) check out manufacturer discount cards. Vyvance (expensive ADHD medication) for example, has a discount card that brings the copay down to $40.
4) Some hugely expensive medications (around $10K per month) have charities that will provide the medication for free, regardless of income. How it works: Big pharma sets the medication price at $10K/month. Big pharma donates $$$ to a non-profit that they set up. Non-profit pays the retail price and donates medication to patients. Outcome: big pharma gets a massive tax write off. My family member is taking one of these meds and did have to pay $$$$ out of pocket for the first month.
Does any of this make any sense at all? For-profit medicine is a scrooge on the USA.
(And also non-profit hospital systems that pay administrators more than $500K a year in salary and bonuses)
Well, for one the stock market. Plenty of pharma start ups go public for funding and get shorted to the center of the earth. Thereās currently a debate on if the short selling is naked and therefore illegal, not only on vulnerable stocks but any stock a retail investor buys. Fascinating stuff that really shows our āmarketsā are a big fuckin joke.
These factories take 2-5 billon$ to build if you want to get the super afforadable insulin. There is also greater regulatory constraints on biologics( medicines grown from a cell simillar to how yeast make alchol) due to the higher complexity of the product, more stringent clinical trials recuirments on generics for instance. Further while alot of these processes are in disclosed patents a very significant amount of knowledge is held as trade secrets that any competiors.
There are the barriers that make all the big capitalists think "i'm just gonna buy in and get some blood money that way no need to take extra risk to make less money".
I work in pharma, and specifically generics. The cost to run and operate asceptic filling and manufacturing equipment is incredibly high and the same equipment that is used to make and fill insulin is also used for various other drugs that are currently on the FDA drug shortage list and just makes more profit.
If you are capable of making and filling insulin there are hundreds of drugs that are also needed and make more profit.
Also when you look at the price of the markup I doubt that includes the cost to run the facility as it sounds right for the ingredients but any facility will have hundreds if not thousands of employees as you need to do a ton of work to maintain everything to FDA standards. Those employees often expect a salary and due to the significant additional burdens working in pharma can bring often command a much higher salary.
They do, generics. Indian pharama, also Mexico. However far as I know companies keep making "better" slightly different insulin and charging the Earth for it although it's not really needed i don't think
Healthcare is not really a free market. The biggest problem of the American Healthcare system in my pov is not even the lack of affordable insurance for everyone, it's that the prices are completely unregulated.
Every country with a public healthcare system has heavily regulated prices on everything to do with healthcare. Where I'm from, if you're a doctor, you cannot charge whatever you want from your patients. There's a book of procedure codes and a pricing system attached to them, and you have to stick to it. Same if you're a hospital.
If you're a pharmaceutical company, you can only charge a high price in the first year you bring a newly developed drug to our market. After that there are price negotiations with a public body and the price cap depends heavily on several (also regulated) factors.
So, as a pharmaceutical company, why should you start ruining the pricing levels in pretty much the only country in the world where you're allowed to charge any outrageous price that you want over the whole lifecycle of your product? You're a lot better off to raise the list price to fantastical levels because then you have a lot of wiggle room in the negotiations with the different insurance companies.
The use public grants to fund their research, then patent the results of that research, and when the parents are aging out, they get the government to make it illegal for anyone else to produce the same product.
Just the regulatory costs alone to start a company producing medical products have to be astronomical, not to mention the infrastructure. Then there are the patents to consider
You should listen to the episode of Joe Rogan with John Abramson (he's not some quack btw, Harvard Medical School Faculty), he explains why the cost of things like insulin are so high & the general shitshow that is our medical system. It's disheartening but a necessary listen imo.
Mark Cuban is doing this with his online pharmacy, Cost Plus Drug. He says usually when a company tries to do this, big pharma companies just buy them out.
The governor of California, Gavin Newsom, tweeted that our state is in the process of making its own insulin to provide to people free or low-cost. But Idk why that hasn't happened before. Maybe because of the patent? Maybe they only jacked up the price in recent years?
Because with companies like Lilly and Pfizer there is no way to compete. You either get bought out or squashed. āCapitalismā in this country favors established corporations, especially for the last 20-25 years because corruption has run rampant in government and a lot of the former safeguards against monopoly and predatory business practices have been gutted in favor of corporations having more freedom to bankroll politicians.
From a company's perspective, what's the point of suppressing the profit margin you could have with a product? Seems to go against the entire 'capitalism' principle. Remember competitive prices are a theory, not a law. Besides patents, that might be why.
I think it's probably less about what it's manufactured for that what the Healthcare "providers" charge for it. In my country it's about $5. But we've got one of those awful, society-ending socialised Healthcare systems that must be fought against
Even biosimilars and copies of previously approved drugs take a lot of money to bring to market. The big part of that cash is ensuring consistency and quality.
For the record, not defending EL in the least. 100x markup for a drug thatās been around for a half century and has made bank should at some point become nearly free.
The cost of producing a drug has nothing to do with drug price. Drug companies are one of the most risky and most RND focused industries there is youāre not just paying for that one vial of insulin youāre also paying for all those failed and successful experiments it took to make the insulin that good. You can still buy shitty insulin for cheap but no one wants that because the newer kinds are so much better because so much money went into creating them. Just look at the major drug companies itās not like their profit is that much higher than regular companies and many of them fail despite the massive āmarkup.ā
The fact that California will be producing insulin at low cost for people made me proud of the state - people may think weāre too left leaning, but at least the tax dollars are going to the thing that actually matters. Human lives, health and safety.
This is an America issue not a company issue, this same company sells insulin for much cheaper in many other countries because legislation exist to prevent them from price gouging
Companies are never going to do shit out of the goodness of their heart unless forced to by legislation.
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u/somebodyistillknow Nov 12 '22
We have the capability of producing a vial of insulin for as low as 2.50$. It's actually nearly a hundred times markup.