More Americans can now get insulin for $35

Thanks to the current administration and the government of California's program to manufacture and sell Insulin at cost, the preexisting monopoly is forced to lower their prices. They are not doing this out of the goodness of their hearts.

Good news, but it is decidedly not a good thing that the price of insulin is a major issue in American politics.

The marketing around this is will win the best <i>newspeak</i> of 2024 - the pharmaceutical companies are making it sound like they&#x27;re selling it at this price out of the kindness of their hearts. No mention of the decades of price gouging and the new laws to put a stop to it.

Incredible that a drug discovered &gt;100 years ago can still be used to price gouge Americans... Thankfully now there seems to be some semblance of rationality?

From the article it seems it&#x27;s from self-imposed price caps. I wonder how long they will be able to keep this up or if they will use this as a moral capital to spike the price (non pun intended) of other medications.<p>It seems to me the main problem in the US healthcare is not the question if it&#x27;s public or not but its large insane costs. The fact that other countries produce the same drugs for a small fraction of the price, sometimes pennies, is very telling of how rotten and inefficient the whole system is.<p>Imagine the price of milk slowly increasing to $100 per gallon over decades, due to greed, regulations, price cartels and speculation, and nobody noticing to ask why. People would probably being to ration milk only for those who need it the most like mothers who can&#x27;t breastfeed their babies and there would be political pressure to create public milk banks and milk insurance and other public mechanisms. But all of that political energy would not solve the root causes of the problem.

My question is always how much are the real effective costs monthly&#x2F;annually? The numbers always seem wild and are frequently quoted in thousands annually, so when you read things like: &gt; “The amount of profit that they might be giving up [by capping costs] is relatively limited,”...<p>I am honest, I don&#x27;t know what to believe, and I don&#x27;t directly know anyone who uses insulin to even have any anecdota.<p>Tangent and I don&#x27;t know how productive it is to discuss, does this have anything with the GLP-1s (Ozempic&#x2F;Mounjaro et al.)?<p>The pressure is coming from legislation, and while there is no doubt lobbying going on, am I wrong that it doesn&#x27;t feel like the same relentless pushback from the triumvirate? Is it just that there is critical mass to drive change, or is the bitter fight not worth it when they have potential weight management products applicable to a much wider audience?

Brazil has free insulin since 2006.

“But drugmakers also faced changes to the Medicaid rebate program that would have likely cost them hundreds of millions of dollars each if they didn’t lower their list prices.“<p>This should have been the opening paragraph.

I have a feeling the drug companies are doing just fine. The high quality marketing and TV commercials during every episode of Jeopardy! (USA) indicate that they’re not cutting back anytime soon.

Does this help everyone? There was a story awhile ago about Walmart selling insulin for cheap, but it was only an older formulation that’s way more difficult to dose

Obviously this means a bunch of drug companies went out of business or stopped producing insulin because it was no longer profitable to make?

“Sanofi is joining the nation’s two other major insulin manufacturers in offering either price caps or savings programs that lower the cost of the drugs to $35 for many patients”<p>Amazing how they manage to not mention that was forced by the Biden administration.

I don&#x27;t know much about diabetes, but I do know that:<p>- Diet and moderate exercise are associated with a reduction in all cause mortality across the board.<p>- &#x27;Blue Zones&#x27; are people who live to be 100 years or older. There&#x27;s a great Netflix show about it if you want to learn more.

&gt; More Americans can now get insulin for $35...<p>So most of them can keep enjoying their addiction to ultra-processed food?