Hey there. When I started making this show, one of the absolute must-do stories on my list was

the price of insulin. It might be the symbol of how out of control our medical system is. I mean,

here's a drug that was discovered a hundred years ago now. A drug that people who discovered it

did not want to patent because they never wanted anybody to make money on it.

And here we are. People die all the time because they can't get it because of the price.

How that came to happen was one of the first dozen or so stories we did. And over time,

as this show started focusing more on the practical how-tos of surviving this out of control medical

system, a lot of the people I've learned the most from have been people who need insulin to live.

People who've had to shape their lives are on making sure they could get medical care they needed

in this case insulin. That's people like our producer, Emily Pisa Kretta.

I've lived with type 1 diabetes since I was 11. For me, insulin is non-negotiable.

If I go without insulin within six hours, I'm throwing up. Within 24, I'm in the ICU.

So basically, my entire adult life has been molded around being able to afford insulin.

Priced as it is in the US, that means I need good health insurance to afford to literally live.

So Emily, one of the very first stories you ever pitched me more than a year ago,

was about an idea to maybe solve this problem for a lot of people.

Yeah, the idea was California could make its own insulin and sell it really cheap.

But I mean, at the time, it was still kind of an idea, something the state of California was

studying. But now it's in a different stage.

It's not a stage where there's real money involved. Here's California governor Gavin Newsom

announcing the plan in July. California is now taking matters into our own hands. The budget I

just signed sets aside a hundred million dollars that we can contract to make our own insulin

...