insulin can cost thousands of dollars per month and it is an indispensable drug. Big Pharma actually raised the prices of insulin in recent years by 50%. so all that extra compensation literally just goes to drug costs.
It's true for new drugs, but insuline price have been multiplied by 5 during the last decade (https://www.ontrackdiabetes.com/type-1-diabetes/insulin-pric...), which is a drug that should actually cost less to make, since we know it very well, and have a lot of demand now with the obesity epidemic.
FYI: The majority of insulin these days is human insulin produced by GM bacteria or yeasts.
Just because there's more than one obvious problem doesn't mean that you can ignore the others.
More to the point, this isn't just about a single disease or drug, the same story applies to a lot of medication, including those that have zero lifestyle causes.
EpiPens are another example mentioned in the article. In the US if your child is born with a deadly allergy you have to carry around very expensive EpiPens that can cost hundreds of dollars due to co-pay and whatever. In Europe these will cost you directly less than $10 and even to the state will cost a lot less than it does to many US patients. One of the company's responses to hiking the price from $50 to $600 for profit reasons was to introduce a cheaper generic version, which as this article points out, is BS.
The 3 main reasons cited by pharmaceutical companies for the high cost of new prescription drugs do not apply to insulin. First, the “high cost of development” is not relevant for a drug that is more than 100 years old; even the latest and most commonly used analog insulin products are all over 20 years old.8 Second, the pricing is not the product of a free market economy. Free market forces are clearly not operational; there is limited competition on price, the person who needs the product is not in a position to negotiate the price, and there is no relationship of price increases over time compared with overall market inflation. The price of insulin has risen inexplicably over the past 20 years at a rate far higher than the rate of inflation.9 One vial of Humalog (insulin lispro), which used to cost $21 in 1999, costs $332 in 2019, reflecting a price increase of more than 1000%.10, 11, 12 In contrast, insulin prices in other developed countries, including neighboring Canada, have stayed the same. Insulin pricing in the United States is the consequence of the exact opposite of a free market: extended monopoly on a lifesaving product in which prices can be increased at will, taking advantage of regulatory and legal restrictions on market entry and importation. Third, the arguments that high costs are needed for continued innovation and that attempts to lower or regulate the prices will hamper innovation are not a valid excuse.13 There is limited innovation when it comes to insulin; the more pressing need is affordability.
Government funding on products never produces cheap products. The problem with drug prices is the cost of dealing with FDA regulations, not the free market. Insulin has no reason to be that expensive if it wasn't for the clusterfuck of IP protection laws that interact with each other and lock basic products out.
Cost is however a lower bound. Insulin at $200/month pales in comparison to generic herceptin at $20k for a six month? course. Of course herceptin is made in mammalian cells; going to a microbial platform might result in a 10x decreasr but that's still about 300 a month on razor thin margin.
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