In India they have mandatory licensing. If a drug company patents a medication and refuses to sell it or doesn’t sell it at a realistic price, the government grants production rights to generic producers and forces the patent holder to give them tech data to actually do production.
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Our congress has been purchased by the rich so we can’t expect anything reasonable from them.
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But the lack of competition is due to government corruption, from the establishments of both parties.
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There’s no law stopping the three major insulin manufacturers (Eli Lilly, Novo Nordisk, and Sanofi) from charging whatever they want for the drugs they make.
This is the core of the problem right here. It’s not just an issue of greed on the part of the people making drugs, but the prioritizing of the right to make unlimited profit above literally every other value in American society. This needs to stop and it needs to stop, well, decades ago.
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I don’t get why a company can’t say they will produce the non-fancy, original flavour insulin and just ignore all the incremental “improvements” made.
Also what happened to the anti-monopoly laws, aren’t they supposed to stop stuff like this?
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I believe the problem with that is that insulin has a limited shelf life so importing isn’t really viable.
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The original insulin was harvested from the pancreases (pancreii?) of livestock, so it doesn’t scale.
There are other non-patented insulins available but they’re wretched by comparison: instead of 15 min to start working, it’s 4 hours, so it kind of wrecks your day.
The 3 makers operate as a cartel, check out the perhaps a smidge suspicious timing and amount of their price increases:
https://i.insider.com/5919f04be559f11c008b55ce?width=1067&format=jpeg
Some noise was made in Congress about it last year but the result was just another unpassed bill on McConnell’s desk.
America would need to get its appetite back for trust-busting, which I’d love to see.
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Capitalism wants us dead, and no matter what they promise, politicians can’t keep us alive.
We can help each other, though. https://openinsulin.org/
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The insulin in my fridge right now has 2022 expiration dates.
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$65 in the UK? Anyone in the UK who has diabetes controlled by insulin or metformin gets all their prescriptions free.
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Yeah, I’m not sure what’s included here. We’re spending about $26AUD a month routinely, but I don’t know what risk or local cost is factored into their costs. Eg, how often do you think you might need an ambulance trip and what’s an average ambulance trip cost?
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Sloth, Gluttony and Pride on my part.
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In the UK ambulance trips, hospital rooms, doctors, nurses, cleaners, etc are all supplied “free” to the user; and paid for from National Insurance. This is the current situation, of course, I fear that Boris Johnson is looking to enrich himself and his cronies by selling off the NHS to the vampiric American medical corporations.
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Paid for from general taxation & borrowing. Tax raised from NI doesn’t come close to the cost of NHS.
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let me summarize: immorality and greed
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How do you tell which one’s the right one?
… sorry, I’ll see myself out.
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I know, I know. I saw it after I wrote it.
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Some Primary Trusts recommend the GP’s limit the number of test strips to average 4 per day but I have never had any problems with getting my GP to give me prescriptions for the equivalent of 8 per day. But this could account for some people’s personal costs.
Abbot’s Libre is a game changer for many people for the equivalent of about 4-5 test strips per day, you get 15 minute testing throughout the day. And now that Libre is able to be prescribed, there will be more and more people going that way.
I personally use a CGM rather than the Libre because it is integrated with my pump but the cost equivalent is about the same.
I’ve moved to Australia now, I’m a bit more out of pocket here, but still only about A$20-30 which I am happy with.
I’ve been a type 1 diabetic in UK, Australia, Japan and had no problems with any of their systems. In Japan the price is different if you are Japanese or gaijin but still very good value. I’m glad I became diabetic after I lived in the US, would not have lived to have to deal with it there.
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