California plans to make its own insulin and sell it super-cheap. Really.

An Arm and a Leg

Society & Culture, Medicine, Health, Health & Fitness, Documentary

4.8 • 1.1K Ratings

🗓️ 29 September 2022

⏱️ 19 minutes

🔗️ Recording | iTunes | RSS

🧾️ Download transcript

Summary

This year, the state of California put up $100 million to produce its own insulin, and sell it for cheap. How’s it going to work? (Is it going to work?)

The price of insulin could be the starkest example of our out-of-control health care system: More than 7 million Americans need it to survive, and some die because they can’t afford it— medicine that’s been around for 100 years, medicine its discoverers didn’t want to patent.

We look at how California’s plan came to be, and what might stand in the state’s way.

Further listening:

How insulin got so horribly expensive was one of the first stories we covered on this show. Here’s that story-- a version we ran in 2021, including updates on what citizen-scientists, hackers, and activists are up to: https://armandalegshow.com/episode/revisiting-insulin/
One of the biggest possible obstacles to California’s plan is the power of middleman companies called pharmacy benefit managers, or PBMs. We unpacked their role, their power, and the profits they make when drug prices are high, in this 2019 episode: https://armandalegshow.com/episode/why-are-drug-prices-so-random-meet-mr-pbm/
… and here’s a deep dive on the devious, clever games among PBMs, pharma companies, and insurance companies — games where we, people who need medicine, always lose. https://armandalegshow.com/episode/swimming-with-sharks/

Also, we mention our recent coverage of the legal and lobbying power of the pharmaceutical industry. That’s in our last episode, here: https://armandalegshow.com/episode/congress-fixed-a-piece-of-medicare/

Here’s a transcript of this episode.

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Transcript

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0:00.0	Hey there. When I started making this show, one of the absolute must-do stories on my list was
0:05.9	the price of insulin. It might be the symbol of how out of control our medical system is. I mean,
0:12.4	here's a drug that was discovered a hundred years ago now. A drug that people who discovered it
0:17.9	did not want to patent because they never wanted anybody to make money on it.
0:22.6	And here we are. People die all the time because they can't get it because of the price.
0:27.2	How that came to happen was one of the first dozen or so stories we did. And over time,
0:33.3	as this show started focusing more on the practical how-tos of surviving this out of control medical
0:38.4	system, a lot of the people I've learned the most from have been people who need insulin to live.
0:44.3	People who've had to shape their lives are on making sure they could get medical care they needed
0:48.9	in this case insulin. That's people like our producer, Emily Pisa Kretta.
0:54.2	I've lived with type 1 diabetes since I was 11. For me, insulin is non-negotiable.
1:00.6	If I go without insulin within six hours, I'm throwing up. Within 24, I'm in the ICU.
1:08.0	So basically, my entire adult life has been molded around being able to afford insulin.
1:13.2	Priced as it is in the US, that means I need good health insurance to afford to literally live.
1:19.1	So Emily, one of the very first stories you ever pitched me more than a year ago,
1:23.3	was about an idea to maybe solve this problem for a lot of people.
1:26.8	Yeah, the idea was California could make its own insulin and sell it really cheap.
1:32.4	But I mean, at the time, it was still kind of an idea, something the state of California was
1:36.9	studying. But now it's in a different stage.
1:40.2	It's not a stage where there's real money involved. Here's California governor Gavin Newsom
1:45.1	announcing the plan in July. California is now taking matters into our own hands. The budget I
1:50.8	just signed sets aside a hundred million dollars that we can contract to make our own insulin
	...

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