In the US, the price of insulin has nearly doubled in five years. In order the get the life-saving medicine, a group of people from Minnesota recently spent 15 hours driving more than 815 miles in a bus to Canada, where it is much cheaper.
Many Americans just can't afford to buy the drugs they desperately need at home, the trip's co-organizer Quinn Nystrom told RT, adding that the price difference across the border is "huge."
"I just went to CVS in Minneapolis, Minnesota. The retail price of the vial [of insulin] is $340. When I went to London, Ontario to pick it up at Walmart pharmacy there, in US dollars the retail price was $26.Nicole Smith-Holt from the charity T1International, which helps people with type 1 diabetes, told RT that Big Pharma had become notorious for hiking the cost of their drugs for decades.
From the high cost of insulin, I've had to go into debt because of it. I've had to put it on credit card. I've had to reach out to family members to help me pay for it because it had gotten too expensive, and I can't cover it because of astronomical cost."
"There is just no reason why [the drug prices] had been increasing to the point where people are dying because they can't afford their insulin. My own family has paid the ultimate price of the pharmaceutical companies price-gouging their patients.
In 2017, my 26-year-old son died from diabetic ketoacidosis. He was rationing [his insulin] because he couldn't afford it. The monthly price for his insulin and diabetic supplies was $1,300."
Comment: Three companies in particular are major culprits here: US firm Eli Lilly, Danish firm Novo Nordisk, and French firm Sanofi. They need to be broken up and/or see swathes of their operations heavily regulated. As things stand, they're operating as powerful, shadow governments, grossly distorting market equilibrium.
Alas, they have politicians in their pockets because they're so rich they write the laws...