I'm really past the whole "pharma need to charge high prices to fund research" line of argument. Aside from being factually untrue (research funding is dwarfed by marketing for example[0]), it is also arguing for a continued unhealthy relationship with pharmaceutical care. A large amount of research is currently publicly funded. Either via public academic research or directly. When that research bears fruit it is oft…
I work in medical research and mostly agree with this, but there are two major problems I see preventing this from becoming a reality: 1) Academic medical research is simply not well tooled, right now, to do the later stages of drug development. What pharma does well and academia does not, is basically optimization of candidates. They do it through high-throughput screens and medicinal chemistry. Those things are ver…
A huge reason I found is your doctor won't ever recommend it. Most diabetics may very well just be blissfully ignorant (I was until recently) that it's even an option, save for Wal-Mart very heavily marketing their "Reli-On" branded insulin produced by Novo Nordisk.
I wonder if PCPs (not endocrinologists) are even aware it exists. I've had many PCPs in the past few years, from one of the best health care centers in the US, never recommend it as an option, and seemed to forget it even existed. I guess when you recommend Eli Lilly's biologic-developed analogs for decades and decades, you damn near forget about the old school insulin out of habit.
I recently switched, WITHOUT a doctor's approval (none would recommend it). I have to be more careful, but my costs of using purely generic everything plummeted to below 1997-era insured levels Increasingly insurance co-pays have gotten far more expensive for the biologics, and increasingly plans don't even cover the biologic-process analogs anymore (where my costs would be $560/mo for just the insulins that aren't covered by my current plan, or $130/mo if I paid another +$230/mo for a better single-person insurance plan -- only a $170/mo net reduction).
My uninsured "no prescription required" OTC costs for all my diabetic supplies (two insulins, sharps container, lancets, test strips) are $69/mo, and $18/mo (prescription required) for generic syringes now. It required taking everything in my own hands and telling every PCP I had to #$%& their hat.