The article is absolutely rage-inducing and we have a right to be angry at this callousness toward people with a potentially deadly condition.
Um… but am I wrong, or did Boing Boing use a stock photo of an enema syringe?
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Blockquote
I find this hard to understand, as there is a standard National Health Service prescription charge of £9, whatever the drug costs to the NHS. And as I am over 60, I get it free.
And if you are Type 1 you can get a Medical Exemption card which brings the cost to free even if you are under 60.
US gets screwed over with costs compared with the UK - even if you say this is covered by insurance, someone still ends up paying.
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I’ll never understand this stuff. My co-worker is insulin dependant and she doesn’t have to pay for it at all because it’s completely covered in my country.
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Same here. Insulin (most formulations, at least) is 100% covered by the state. Tablet medication for type 2 diabetes used to be fully covered, but these days you only get 65% coverage. Still, you have a yearly payment cap of about 600€, and once you’ve hit that, the rest is free.
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Yep. The headline should have read:
Insulin prices are killing Americans
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Just looking at the cost of that now, it’s about €1,000 a month in Ireland or $4,500 a month in the US. Here payment for prescribed drugs is capped at €135 per month per family (not sure what it is for an individual) unless you qualify for fully free. So even in a country which is dependent on pharmaceutical companies for a huge part of its gainful employment and which thus is not a good place to look for approaches that sideline rent seeking, a sane healthcare system on top of that makes life much less… scary. I’d be terrified to move to the US for healthcare reasons.
But don’t worry: once the neoliberal far right austerity addicts have had their way we will all be facing into the same abyss.
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They didn’t sell a patent for manufacturing human insulin from genetically engineered E. coli.
Human insulin from genetically engineered E. coli was developed in 1978, 41 years ago. Patents from that era lasted for 17 years (since bumped to 20).
The way pharma works is that the companies periodically make minor tweaks to drugs, which may or may not make them better in some way, patent the new version, and take the old version off the market. This “evergreening” process keeps the same basic drug under patent forever.
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News flash: “Americans” are still people.
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Yes, 55 years after Banting and Best.
I was only saying that I didn’t agree that we could (should?) all still be using cow and pig insulin.
The pharmaceutical industry is a parasite, granted.
But not all changes to drugs are just pretexts for extending patents and gouging people.
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I don’t always make changes to my drugs as a pretext for extending patents and gouging people,
But when I do, it kills people
- the world’s more interesting medical industrial complex
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That’s the American Dream! Work hard to afford lifesaving drugs.
Distribute bootstraps instead of insulin.
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After my mother in law passed away we found she’d stopped filling her insulin prescriptions. To do it she’d have had to ask for help financially. She didn’t want us paying for more as we were already her primary support because social security and food stamps didn’t remotely cover her after her husband died. She basically only got prescription meds that stopped her from hurting. This certainly contributed to her heart attack because she stopped getting her heart meds as well.
She basically died earlier than she should have because she was poor.
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I’ll never underdtand this insutrance stuff too. I have type 2 diabetes, but I don’t pay anything for the medicines. People with type 1 or LADA have insulin and test strips free.
I live in Italy
Our lack of humanity is sadistically refusing to allow them to attempt to save themselves in order to shake out every last cent from the living ones before tossing them in the heap of corpses. It’s definitely a tad darker than just “failing” them.
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The US is nuts.
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