There was a NYT op-ed on insuin costs that a lot of us reacted to last week. Two follow-up letters today I thought might be of interest. One is the official reply from the president of Lilly Diabetes and the other is from an advocate and former R/NPH user:
that would be Kelly Close, of diaTribe!
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And unfortunately Kelly failed to advocate for us. Yes, newer insulin products are valuable and superior to R and NPH, but we deserve an explanation for the rise in prices that are not justified by increased costs. If we argue that the costs to society matter (as she does) then we also have to accept that it is in society’s best interests to “regulate” the insulin market to keep collusion and predatory behavior from harming society.
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sigh. I was also a bit taken aback at the CEO of Lilly’s comment that Humalog went off patent in 2013. last time I checked, the price was prohibitive for me. I’m at the point where I only go to the endo to beg for free samples.
I was disappointed in Kelly Close’s position of firmly supporting the corporations that produce what I consider to be overpriced insulin. I agree with her that we need to give some credit to the analog insulin producers for saving us the costs of emergency room visits due to the improved formulations. The huge rise in insulin prices, however, eclipses that benefit by orders of magnitude. This is a classic oligopoly (too few competitors) and a failure of the market.
I love the work that Kelly does with diaTribe and give her the benefit of the doubt that her letter to the editor was edited for length and perhaps some balance to her position was cut.
I would have expected Lilly to not address the issue. There are in fact huge barriers to competitors entering the insulin market, and patent protection is hardly a major factor. Lilly can claim they are helping patients but the fact is they saw a 20% revenue increase driven by higher insulin prices. They are profit taking at the expense of patients and society. And arguing that improved reimbursement “fixes” the problem is just wrong, we all pay for higher costs even if it is through increased insurance premiums and Medicare.
A friend of the family, as it were. Good to know–thanks!
We can slice and dice this semantically forever (and probably will). The bottom line is that insulin in the U.S. is not priced to produce a reasonable recovery of costs nor to control the overall cost to society. It’s priced to squeeze every possible drop out of the consumer. That is not the case in other parts of the world.
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As most of us know, we pay approximately seven times what Europeans pay for insulin, more than any government in the world. A drug company can legally raise the price of any drug at will. Google Martin Shreli who bought the rights to a drug, the name escapes me at the moment used to treat toxoplasmosis in AIDs patients. He raised the cost from approximately a dollar a pill to 790 dollars a pill. Legally. He was smirking and giggling through a Congressional investigation. He had a lot to do with delaying the release of Afrezza by a couple of years, I read somewhere else. Fortunately, the Feds got him on another charge, insider trading. Only political action will solve this problem. Obamacare can’t. The only nominee willing to fix this is Bernie Sanders. Love that guy! Trump has mentioned “bidding for the lowest price,” but he has not mentioned putting price limits on how much a pharma company can charge for a drug. So he won’t solve the problem.