Wednesday, June 19th, 2019
Stephan: Like you, I suspect, I have several friends who are diabetic; and my late brother was a very brittle diabetic, constantly struggling with the disease. It's not an uncommon medical disorder -- nearly 10% of Americans have it. But I had not fully appreciated what Big Pharma was doing to these people. Even though I have done several stories in SR about the grotesque rise in the cost of insulin in the U.S., and the numbers were horrible, they weren't real to me in a human sense.
But last week I was in Broomfield, Colorado at the Society for Scientific Exploration and I had a conversation with an acquaintance I hadn't seen in some years. She is a middle-aged scientist living in Minneapolis and has been a diabetic since childhood. As we caught up with each other's lives she began to tell me the story of insulin as she lives it. In order to survive she now makes monthly trips to Canada to purchase the drug that keeps her alive. Insulin is not an elective drug; having access to it is a matter of life or death for diabetics. Diane told me that what cost her $1,200 eight years ago, now would cost her $12,000, a sum she simply could not afford; she has three kids, the oldest of whom is also diabetic.
As I sat there with my mouth hanging open she told me about insulin caravans. How she and other diabetics gather and make a monthly trip to a nearby city in Canada where a particular pharmacy caters to American diabetics. (I am not going to say where they go or which pharmacy they go to, because I do not want to create problems for them.) It was an awful story of the greed of big pharma and people whose lives are now scheduled around their trips to Canada. Here's the basic information.
With the rising cost of health insurance premiums and prescription drugs, Americans are scrambling for ways to cover lifesaving care. Injuries and illness, whether due to freak accidents or as chronic issues, often come “at a staggeringly high financial cost,” writes Jeffrey Young in HuffPost.
Sometimes this means Americans resort to crowdfunding their medical care. As Young explains, “more than 50 million donors contributed more than $5 billion to GoFundMe campaigns between 2010 and 2017.” For the 7.5 million Americans with diabetes who rely on insulin to survive, it might mean international travel. As Emily Rauhala reports in The Washington Post, Americans who can’t afford insulin here are making trips to Canada.
“It felt like we were robbing the pharmacy,” said Quinn Nystrom, a Type-1 diabetic who joined a caravan driving from Minnesota to Fort Frances, Ontario. There, she paid $1,200 for a supply of insulin that would have cost $12,000 at home.
The price of insulin has risen considerably from when Nystrom was diagnosed with diabetes as a […]
This is great news. Common folks taking charge of their lives and healthcare. This is how normal people react when a corrupt system puts barriers in the way of meeting their basic needs. If the system is as corrupt as many believe the next logical step is that the behavior described in the article will be criminalized.