311–320 of 392 posts
Honest question, how do pharma executives walk the streets? If I was engaged in activities that vile I'd be terrified of being murdered by a vigilante.
Similar to a pulse oximeter that measures oxygen saturation non-invasively, is there some research on finding similarly the level of glucose in the blood, etc?
Why not allow patients to buy generic insulin from overseas (from India for example) ? If I could just you know, ask a friend of mine to fly to India and bring a monthly supply of cheap India made generic of Humalog, that would be great, right? and if insurance company kicks in a few bucks for me, that would drive down the cost of care for insurance company as well
This is bogus. Wal-mart sells insulin for $24.88 a vial without prescription currently. It's only the newer 'guchi' insulin brands that are crazy expensive. Stuff from 1996 that is compared to in this article is actually cheaper than it was in 1996 (adjusted for inflation).
Bear in mind: when you mis-dose insulin, your blood turns into acid.
No endocrinologist would ever recommend treatment with older insulins over the new stuff. The only way it happens is because of cost.
Pretty cool, but it's a problem with the law and needs to be fixed in law.
Is insulin a dangerous drug? Is it addictive? Does it need to be so heavily regulated that only Big Pharma can manufacture and sell it?
I don't think it's reasonable to expect everyone who takes or buys it, to be able to determine if what they need to inject into their body to survive is safe and functional. So yeah, I do think there should be laws and limits on what qualifies, and who's allowed to make it.
Do I think a large corporation is the only thing able to do that? No, but I suspect that it'd be hard to prove you can make the minimum guarantees that it's safe from the first dose to the last. And that you have resources to attempt to compensate anyone you hurt if you do break those guarantees.
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Yes, but what about economies or scale? And the the production is already decentralized. I guess there’s more than one plant in the US.
Those econmies of scale are simply driving up profits for an oligopoly that uses IP laws and acquisitions to extract maximum value from sick people. We could revoke the IP and thus force these companies to compete on price... but that hasn't happened. Thus the only solution that is making any progress is circumventing the IP and developing an open process.
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Every drug company gives away their drugs for free to people who can't afford it in the US. It's sad that not enough people take advantage of patient assistance programs.
This is apologist thinking at best, intentionally misleading at worst. You are correct that companies do have patient assistance programs. What you’re leaving out is that this applies to a small subset of people that usually have to be denied federal/state insurance, not have any other kind of insurance, and make less than 4x federal poverty level. additionally, they rarely provide a lifelong supply. Imagine being a…
Gilead would reimburse any out of pocket costs.
Even still it's just a sick game to bilk insurance companies, and thus us insurance premium payers, out of more money while pretending to be looking out for consumers. The monthly cost on my really great insurance was still over $1k out of pocket, which took a bunch of paper work and over a month to get back. Poor people don't have that luxury.
Oh and now that Gilead's license has run out they have a new very expensive PrEP drug magically appear. Which they tout doesn't have as bad long term downside on your organs. The skeptic in me seems to think the timing is too perfect. if there is a safer drug throw it out asap. maybe they did, I can't know that but I have a strong distaste for Gilead in particular.
For-profit healthcare is one of the biggest moral failings of our country.