HWN Suggests

After a century, insulin is still expensive – could DIYers change that?

Soon after Federick Banting discovered that insulin could be used to treat diabetes in 1921, he sold the patent to the University of Toronto for about a dollar. Banting received the Nobel prize because his discovery meant a life-saving drug could become widely available. Nearly a century later, an American with diabetes can pay as much as US$400 per month for insulin, driving some uninsured patients to desperate and dangerous measures. Clearly, something went wrong.

read full article

Featured

  Eli Lilly cuts the price of insulin, capping drug at $35 per month out-of-pocket

Drugmakers may be seeing "the writing on the wall that high prices can't persist forever," said Larry Levitt, an executive vice president with the nonprofit Kaiser Family Foundation, which studies health care. "Lilly is trying to get out ahead of the issue and look to the public like the good guy," Levitt said.

Articles of Interest

A Do-It-Yourself Revolution in Diabetes Care

Biohackers are attempting to resurrect an older product to address the lack of generic insulin, Dr. Greene said. “I don’t think that we should be surprised that a population of technologically savvy patients, whose lives are dependent on access to a supply of a biological agent, should be interested in taking means of production into their own hands, especially at time when insulin prices have risen at unpredictably alarming rates.”

Break Up the Insulin Racket

Insulin has been around for almost a century. The World Health Organization considers it an essential medicine, which means it should be available “at a price the individual and the community can afford.” So why is this product increasingly too expensive for many Americans?

Diabetes Patients at Risk From Rising Insulin Prices

A Yale study found that one in four patients admitted to cutting back on insulin use because of cost. The consequences can be deadly.

Good Lord. Even the Price of Insulin Is Skyrocketing

At this point, it’s getting hard to keep track of all the stories of drug companies jacking up the prices of prescription medications to nauseating heights for little identifiable reason other than the fact that, unlike in other developed countries, the U.S. government lets them.

Here's Why Insulin Is So Expensive, And How To Reduce Its Price

She drew the life-saving medication into the syringe, just 10cc of colorless fluid for the everyday low price of, gulp, several hundred dollars. Was that a new chemotherapy, specially designed for her tumor? Was it a “specialty drug,” to treat her multiple sclerosis? Nope. It was insulin, a drug that has been around for decades.

Insulin Pens: Improving Adherence and Reducing Costs

Pen needles are more convenient to use, less painful, and result in better adherence and improved health outcomes for patients with diabetes than traditional pen/ needle/vial administration of insulin.

Insulin price hikes tell us a lot about what's wrong with drug pricing in America

Insulin price hikes tell us a lot about what's wrong with drug pricing in America

Insulin Quest: When Lifesaving Drugs Are Out of Reach

Why some diabetics are taking extreme measures to access the insulin they need to survive.

The already staggering insulin shortage could get worse

But at the moment, insulin demand projections suggest that unless countries figure out how to make insulin more readily available for their affected populations—through such measures as improving access to insurance, forcing insurance companies to pay for more, or forcing drug companies to stabilize costs—millions more will go without the treatment for their type 2 diabetes.

The High Price of Insulin Is Literally Killing People

As concerns about insulin availability have increased, paired with the fear of rising prices, advocates have sought to bring attention to this often-invisible issue by using #insulin4all across social media platforms. Insulin access is a topic discussed frequently within the diabetic community, but outside of it there is often little awareness of how serious insulin stretching can be.

These Biohackers Are Creating Open-Source Insulin

The biohackers’ goal is fairly straightforward: To make and refine synthetic insulin from E. coli bacteria and document their process. The result, they hope, will be that a generic pharmaceutical company will use that protocol to make insulin that’s affordable for diabetes patients all over the world

When Old Drugs Are Made New Again

How can it be that a drug which has been on the market for more than 90 years – and is effective at slowing or even stopping the progression of a common, deadly disease – is still so costly that Americans can lose their eyesight, their kidneys, their limbs, and their independence because they are unable to afford it?

Resources

Stand Up for Affordable Insulin

Our goal is to ensure that insulin is affordable and accessible for all people who need this lifesaving medication.