Around 1.3 million U.S. adults with diabetes have either skipped entire insulin doses, taken less than needed, or put off purchases of the medicine over the past year due to its high cost is a striking indictment of a healthcare system that allows profit-seeking pharmaceutical companies to determine prices at will. Pharmaceutical firms have increased insulin prices year after year, even for products that remain unchanged. Eli Lilly has raised the list price of the commonly used insulin product Humalog by an inflation-adjusted 680% since it started selling the drug in 1996.
The new study, published in the Annals of Internal Medicine, analyzed data from the 2021 National Health Interview Survey, examining a sample representative of 1.4 million U.S. adults with type 1 diabetes and 5.8 million with type 2 diabetes.
The results indicate that 16.5% of all adult insulin users across the U.S. rationed insulin in some way in the past year, with rationing more common among those with type 1 diabetes than type 2.
"Universal access to insulin, without cost barriers, is urgently needed," Adam Gaffney, an ICU doctor at the Cambridge Health Alliance and the lead author of the study, explained. "We have allowed pharmaceutical companies to set the agenda, and that is coming at the cost to our patients." He had personally "cared for patients who have life-threatening complications of diabetes because they couldn’t afford this life-saving drug."
Human Rights Watch (HRW) described insulin access in the U.S. as "a privilege that many cannot afford," noting that "soaring medicine prices and inadequate health insurance coverage can result in unaffordable out-of-pocket costs that undermine the right to health, drive people into financial distress and debt, and disproportionately impact people who are socially and economically marginalized, reinforcing existing forms of structural discrimination."
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