If you’re a diabetic like I am, managing a chronic illness with no real cure other than daily blood sugar checks and a constant supply of insulin can be hard enough on its own. When you throw in worrying about the cost of co-pays for your medication and having to deal with insurance companies that don’t want to pay for the medication you need to survive, it gets that much harder.
According to a study by Reuters, insulin prices nearly doubled from 2012 to 2016. If the average diabetic goes through 60 units of insulin a day, the price per day also jumped from $7.50 to $15 in 2016 as well. This may not seem like a big deal to those that don’t understand what insulin is, or why it is so essential, or even why it’s become so expensive, but price gouging on medication that people will die without is a serious issue.
Many diabetics that can’t afford their insulin or their medical supplies are forced to ration them – we’ve all heard the horror stories in the news lately about diabetics dying from rationing their insulin or having to cross the Northern border into Canada to afford their insulin.
Rationing insulin is extremely dangerous – high blood sugars caused by not enough insulin can lead to diabetic ketoacidosis, which is essentially acid in the blood stream that is caused by the body being forced to burn fat as an energy source as a result of the inability to process sugar as an energy source like most people that can naturally produce insulin are able to do without even thinking about it.
Diabetic ketoacidosis can lead to vision impairments, organ failure, coma, and death. Without insulin, diabetics will go into DKA and they can die. This is a fact – nobody can survive without insulin.
According to Business Insider, a vial of insulin costs, at most, around $6 to produce. A year’s supply of insulin could actually only cost anywhere from $48-$133, depending on what type of insulin it is. However, the three largest manufacturers of insulin – Eli Lilly, Sanofi, and Novo Nordisk – hold 96% of the global market volume, and since that means there are no real competitors in the market, this results in price increases for the drug that literally NOBODY can live without.
I didn’t ask to be diabetic. I didn’t want an illness that will never go away, that makes me sick, that can negatively affect my health in the long and short term, that I always have to be on top of 24/7. I don’t want to have to pay crazy amounts of money that I don’t have for insulin and worry about making it last into the next month. But that’s reality for myself and a lot of other diabetics in the US today, unfortunately, and it needs to change before yet another person dies from rationing insulin.