‘Everyone is at fault’: With insulin prices skyrocketing, there’s plenty of blame to go around
WASHINGTON — Fifteen years ago, a patient with diabetes might have paid $175.57 for a 20-milliliter vial of the long-acting insulin Humulin R U-500.
Today, he’d shell out $1,487 for the same tiny vial, according to wholesale acquisition cost data from Elsevier’s Gold Standard Drug Database.
It’s easy to cast blame on the drug makers: Just three pharmaceutical companies, all of them massive, global enterprises, control the vast majority of the $27 billion global insulin market: Sanofi, Eli Lilly, and Novo Nordisk. And they always have, virtually since the drug was discovered back in 1921.
But a thorough review of the drug’s nearly 100-year history reveals a much more complicated story: one that makes it clear that the drug makers, their generic counterparts, doctors, and, increasingly, the Food and Drug Administration itself all share blame for the broken insulin market. And while there are a slew of ideas being floated for solving this problem — everything from seizing drug patents to capping how much people with diabetes can pay out of pocket for insulin — multiple policy experts told STAT that creating generic competition is likely the key to bringing costs down for the more than 7.5 million Americans who rely on the drug.
As Congress gears up to investigate to bring the big three companies before her Energy and Commerce subcommittee — it’s worth questioning whether there isn’t reason to call others, like generic manufacturers or FDA Commissioner — to testify, too.
