Meanwhile, 10 euros per vial here in Europe. At least his original plan for widespread and easy availability has partially succeeded.
In civilized countries at least.
Soo why sell the patent for $1 and have it be potentially exploited when you could hold onto it and licence use for free?
IIRC the insulin being sold now is manufactured differently and the patents are completely different anyway
But overall your point is good
It is different, but it’s still incredibly cheap to make, $4 a vial, so it costing in the hundreds is just antihuman…
It’s not anti human, the rest of us get it just fine. It’s specifically anti-american
This is a great way of phrasing things.
Services that are necessary for life (like healthcare)…if other countries have figured out how to make it affordable/free (at point of use), any person or industry that tries to extract profit out of it is literally anti-American.
Bingo. It’s extortion and if the asshat in charge gave any kind of a real fuck about cheap medicine it should’ve been a day 1 fix.
The insulin produced now has benefited from advances in technology just like most things. The fast acting insulin is predictable and works in 45 minutes to an hour and a half. The original insulin took hours and wasn’t nearly as predictable or stable. Testing/monitoring technology has seen even more significant advances.
I owe Banting and his colleagues my life, but it is different. That’s not to say that the continued well being of the public should be profitable and exclusive.
I mean insulin is about 10x more expensive in the USA compared to other Western countries. It’s cheaper still in lower income countries. Many European countries also have a price ceiling for medication, so your monthly cost for life-saving drugs is capped.
I don’t know exactly why a manufacturer doesn’t set up production for much cheaper generics in the USA, but for whatever reason Americans are getting price gouged like Satan doesn’t believe in tomorrow.
Whatever reason? Simple reason: legal to maximize profits over people’s misfortunes.
To be fair, most Americans agree with the capitalist first approach right up until it affects them individually. If they were willing to help each other instead of believing that anyone other than themself is a freeloader and lazy, they would have the support that other countries take for granted.
It was sold to a Canadian public university to manage the patent for public good.
They have, everywhere else in the world basically, insulin costs pennies.
In America, they have been able to patent certain formulations and delivery methods, and they keep making marginal modifications to string the patents out to keep Americans locked in to absurd insulin prices.
Was that the answer you thought it was going to be?
deleted by creator
Shoutout to the uninsured cost of the medication I need to live
(90 tablets)
Does anyone really need to live? What you need is to be producing value for your company!
/S
Also I just remembered, I used to have United Healthcare and they didn’t cover this medicine so I had to switch. Had to pay ~$300 for that refill (i think it was fewer tablets and 75mg that time). $40 on my current insurance.
Anyway I’m a big Luigi fan
wahoo
Canadians: invented drug and patent it freely Americans: Finds way to kill the most people possible while making the most amount of money
To be fair, the killing isn’t the point; they’re the product. Its just that profit is God, so killing in its name is justified.
Killing poors for the joy of it? That’s just an evil bonus.
Naive question from a european: Aren’t there companies on the market who can offer a cheaper price and therefore beat greedy competitors?
Yup, but their products don’t work as well, don’t work for everyone, or have other downsides. Banting’s original insulin would be dirt cheap today, but it’s shit compared to what we have now, so the best products on the market today charge a premium for either efficacy or convenience.
I wondered if all the sane Americans did a mass exodus to Canada, Europe, UK, Australia etc, what effect that would have
A lot of us would need financial sponsorship. So there’d be a literal financial drain on those economies.
I still would like to sign up.
Not if you stayed, then it’s an investment. Money doesn’t just disappear when goes to poor people, they use it to buy things like food and stuff. It would only be a financial drain if you were sending that money back home.
The North American mind cannot comprehend the benefits of supporting the poor.
And a hell of a good one. Adults will have already passed through education, so we would save on that part.
UBI should be ubiquitous.
UBI = Universal Basic Income
Perhaps strain would be a better word than drain - it would still be a short-mid term financial burden to take even a tiny fraction of the sane population from the US, it’s a big country. Sure would be nice if it could be arranged though…
True.
I get that, the initial investment would be pretty significant.
I’m not against it of course, I just think it’s necessary to understand the risks of any gamble.
Have you looked into what it takes to get a permanent visa to one of those countries? It’s not easy.
Its not that hard especially for an American.
Its prohibitively impossible.
I did it a while ago, would recommend.
Aren’t you still paying taxes to the USA? Just curious.
You have to earn over something like 100k+ for the US to tax you. Salaries are lower here.
Ohhhh that’s interesting.
You still have to file, but you don’t need to pay taxes unless you’re earning enough that the visa won’t be a problem.
But, like, if you close everything out and never go back…
The IRS will still find you lol
But then what?
Is a foreign government going to extradite you for missing paperwork and no outstanding tax debts (especially because everyone else thinks it’s nuts that we require nonresident citizens to file taxes)? I guess it’s possible, but it strikes me as very unlikely.
But if you’re still financially attached to the US/likely to visit, they’ve got some power over you.
I’m not a lawyer or an accountant (obviously. This is not best practices)
We should be thankful for those of us not born in a third world country like the USA. 😌🙏
Americans suffer from Stockholm syndrome
I would literally move if I could afford it and if it was even a little easier.
Stockholm syndrome suggests we enjoy it or want to be here.
Reminder that the term Stockholm Syndrome was coined to blame victims for being rightly more afraid of the police than their captors:
In [Jess Hill’s] 2019 treatise on domestic violence See What You Made Me Do, Australian journalist Jess Hill described the syndrome as a “dubious pathology with no diagnostic criteria”, and stated that it is “riddled with misogyny and founded on a lie”; she also noted that a 2008 literature review revealed “most diagnoses [of Stockholm syndrome] are made by the media, not by psychologists or psychiatrists.” In particular, Hill’s analysis revealed that Stockholm authorities, responded to the robbery in a way that put the hostages at greater risk from the police than from their captors (hostage Kristin Enmark, who during the siege was granted a telephone call with Swedish Prime Minister Olof Palme, reported that Palme told her that the government would not negotiate with criminals); as well, she observed that Bejerot’s diagnosis of Enmark was made without ever having spoken to her.
Otherwise, we probably agree that AmeriKKKans are a feckless, servile people.
Nils Bejerot was a total hack. He tried to ban comic books, and later transcribed that same energy in a war on drugs that has resulted in some of the worst health outcomes for drug users in Europe. Unfortunately his ability to be confidently incorrect swayed a lot of gullible rubes, and his legacy still casts a shadow over Sweden to this day.
Stockholm syndrome is a proposed condition to explain why hostages occasionally develop a psychological bond with their captors. It is named after an attempted bank robbery in 1973, in Stockholm, Sweden
?
My comment was in response to a comment about AmeriKKKans having “Stockholm Syndrome”, which as it turns out is not a real or valuable diagnosis. However, I do not disagree with the implied critique of AmeriKKKan people as being feckless and servile people.
AmeriKKKans
whoa! so edgy, poignant, and relevant!
and so creative!
amazing!
*and everyone clapped*AmeriKKKa is a settler-colonialist project, and the entity and its defenders deserve zero respect. I mentioned AmeriKKKans because the person I replied to used Stockholm Syndrome to critique AmeriKKKans on a post critiquing the AmeriKKKan healthcare system, so critiquing AmeriKKKa is relevant here. And I don’t like spelling AmeriKKKa as part of USA correctly because (1) places like Central America and South America should be distinguished from the United States of AmeriKKKa, and (2) it offends the people who need to be offended, i.e. people who still feel affinity for the AmeriKKKan project and people who tone-police others who are just brutally honest in speaking their minds.
You are literally posting from an anarchist Lemmy instance, why TF is this controversial to you?
wow, each time you write “AmeriKKKa” you just get so so much smarter.
it makes me really care about what else you have to say… so so much!
Stanford has managed to cure type 1 diabetes in mice. Lets see if big pharma lets that get anywhere.
California is contracting its own insulin supply and it’ll be available for $11 a pen starting Jan 1, 2026. I know not every state can or are willing to do this but just throwing out some examples and hopefully optimism to somehow fight the American decline from within it. We’re in a unique position as our state economy is larger than most countries but I am hopeful we will throw our weight around to counter the bs. https://www.chhs.ca.gov/blog/2025/10/17/governor-newsom-announces-affordable-calrx-insulin-11-a-pen-will-soon-be-available-for-purchase/
When you kill the wealthy and their enforcers, you should be shouting “blood for blood”.
Since we’re roleplaying you should also say “skulls for the skull throne.”
No. They kill us. They murder people. Make it clear why this is happening, why any negotiation starts with every billionaire shot in the gut and left to bleed out, as a compromise.
If I’m remembering the original sysntesis for insulin used dogs, and it was harvest from them after being killed. It’s unjust that insulin is so expensive, but also modern production methods are not the problem here. It’s greed.
I summon, Luigi!
My name’s not Luigi
What are you summoning
grunts Damn thing isn’t working.
I really don’t get it. If it was in the freezer, why will it be damaged when put back again? Is it that once defreezed some reaction goes on and shouldn’t be stopped? I really don’t get it. Would it be better to keep it outside the freezer once it warm up?
It degrades from the freezing process and then dosage becomes unpredictable and thus dangerous. If you have insulin it’s got big words on it saying don’t.
Heres the side of some humalog:
DO NOT FREEZE. Store refrigerated at 36°F to 46°F [2°C to 8°C] until time of use. Store in-use vials refrigerated at 36°F to 46°F [2° C to 8°C]. If refrigeration is not possible, store at room temperature (up to 86°F [30°C]). Protect from direct heat and light.
I’m sure an experienced medic in an emergency could work with it somehow, but for the rest of us living in civilization, insulin that has been outside their recommended temperature range is very dangerous.
Long-acting insulin has crystals that dissolve at body temperature over time, hence it can gradually release insulin over hours. If you break or dissolve those crystals by freezing/thawing/overwarming, the best scenario would be that it became fast-acting insulin, and it would crash your glucose instantly on injection of your usual dose. The worst scenario is that it no longer acts like insulin.
Other way around. The removal of the prolonged release is what would kill you right away. Hypoglycaemia kills WAY faster than hyperglycaemia. Like - one takes minutes, the other one hours to days).
I thought “crash your glucose instantly” would be understood as hypoglycemia, but English is not my native language.
I think they’re saying that your proposed best case causes possible instant death, whereas the proposed worst case would take days to kill you.
Endogenous human insulin is stable up to five freeze-thaw cycles. However, various types of synthetic insulin become less potent once they’ve been frozen. It functionally becomes impossible to know how much insulin you need to compensate for the food you’re eating
Freezing temps breaks down insulin and causes it to lose efficacy which less efficacy is something you don’t want with something that keeps you alive
Methinks you read it wrong friend; it was stored in the fridge originally
It was in the fridge, then put in the freezer.
It apparently loses effectiveness when subjected to extreme temps, but that loss depends on length of exposure. [Source]
rea bra
