| > I feel like I'm missing something here. My understanding of why insulin is so expensive: laws are created and enforced by the government preventing people from competing in the space The article doesn't do a good job of explaining that "insulin" isn't a single drug, or at least how they describe it. Generic insulin is cheap. You can get it for $25/vial from your local Walmart. With production costs, regulation compliance, storage, transport, and paying pharmacists, they're not making much profit on that. Patented insulin analogs are not cheap. They have different characteristics for duration and onset time that make them easier to dose, but the patent means that you can't produce and sell it unless you own the patent or have licensed it. Drug companies who own these patents set their prices according to what they can get insurers to pay, not according to what they expect people to pay out of pocket. One of the weird quirks of the US medical system is that drug companies often have alternate prices for people without insurance. Remember, the high prices aren't designed for you to pay, the high prices are designed to extract as much money as possible from your insurance company. You can see this in action on drug company websites. Lilly has a program that will cap your payments at $35 for even their expensive insulin analogs: https://www.insulinaffordability.com/ You have to renew every 12 months and hope they're still doing it, but they generally keep these programs around because it dampens the outrage about the high prices. |