Name: High insulin prices in the U.S. are putting some diabetics' lives at risk
Uploaded: 2021-12-06
Duration: 5 min 46 s
Description: Patients are pleading for reform of a drug-pricing system driven by incentives and greed.

Patients are pleading for reform of a drug-pricing system driven by incentives and greed.

High insulin prices in the U.S. are putting some diabetics' lives at risk

JOEY MCLEISTER/Star Tribune via Getty Images

Health

High insulin prices in the U.S. are risking diabetics' lives

100 years ago this year. In 1921, insulin was discovered and produced for the first time. And for the first time in history it was possible For people with type one diabetes to live. And so the big issue and has been for a long time is why does it cost so much, especially when people need it to live? The price. In the year 2000 was around $30 a bottle. The price today Retail at my local pharmacy at $365 for this Very tiny little bodies of influence. My important prescription is for four bottles every month. So one bottle left me about a week. If I didn't have insurance, I would be paying Most of $1500 every month for my prescription. Insulin costs more in the United States than it does in any other developed economy and not just by a little, but by multiples. Insulin's that cost hundreds of dollars for the uninsured in the US Cost maybe $20 in other countries. You go back 2025 years and adjust everything for inflation. Insulin was much less expensive back then. What changed was the rise of a business called pharmacy benefit management companies in that pharmacy benefit managers actually began back in the sixties or seventies helping insurance companies just deal with the huge paperwork of all the prescriptions that they had to pay for. They saw that they had a huge number of prescriptions that they were processing and they realized they could deal with the manufacturers of drugs, uh representing many insurance companies had a lot of buying power and they could help insurance companies get good prices. They could help insurance companies pay less. That was the whole idea. The PBMs said to the insurance companies, look what we can do is negotiate with the drug manufacturing to get a rebate on the price you pay for their drugs. So whenever you pay for somebody's prescription, you pay whatever the drug maker is charging. But then we'll get you a rebate from them. So it lowers your overall cost fundamentally. The drug makers realized the bigger the rebate I can give to the PBMs, the more the PBMs are gonna like me and my drug. And that means that they're more likely to put my drug in the top tier of the drugs that the insurance company sells. It is not a typical supply and demand economic model. The model is the supply and demand Within that little bubble of manufacturer PBM insurance company and your pharmacy, the actual person who needs the product is left out of that equation. Yeah, a really major development in the insulin world took place just this past summer when the FDA approved the very first insulin that we consumers would regard as a genuine generic right now. We have just this one real generic and our experience with other generic drugs is that having just one doesn't do a whole lot to lower the price because after all, it only has to under price the brand name drug by a little bit in order to get the market. Now, will there be a second and a third generic insulin of this particular type? That's what everybody in the industry and everybody in the insulin world is watching mm The insulin problem isn't really just an insulin problem. It's an example of how all prescription drugs in the United States are Christ reports are that at least 25% of insulin using diabetic insulin using major type one or type two and stay alive. You need to take an insulin injection. 25% of us are reported to have rations at some point throughout our lives of having diabetes. This is incredibly dangerous because you can go into diabetic coma and die and it happens. Uh nobody knows exactly how often it happens, but it seems to happen on average a few times a day. Somewhere in the United States monetizing healthcare is a normal result of the capitalist corporate environment, which is what we live in in the United States. And that's fine. Just don't price it so high that we die. As a result, the risk to a diabetic, It doesn't matter if you're type one, Type two and gestational diabetes or some other newly discovered kind of diabetes, if you need insulin, you need it to stay alive. And if you can't afford it, you pay with your life. Nobody. No one should have to make those kinds of decisions when it comes to basic health care. Mhm.