Revisiting insulin, as relevant (and expensive) as ever

An Arm and a Leg

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

4.8 • 1.1K Ratings

🗓️ 25 February 2021

⏱️ 31 minutes

🔗️ Recording | iTunes | RSS

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Summary

We're re-releasing and updating a story we first reported in 2019, about how insulin got to be so horribly expensive—the scientists who discovered it did NOT want price or profits to keep it away from people who need it—and what some people are doing about it, today.

The story seems especially relevant right now, for two reasons:

the COVID vaccine process has reminded all of us how vital it is to BOTH get breakthroughs in the lab AND to make sure everyone can afford to benefit from them.
The second half of the episode—about ways that folks who need insulin are taking action on their own behalf—turns out to have been a sneak preview of this show's current focus on self-defense.

Also, the whole thing is a wild ride. And: The updates from people we talked to in 2019? All more encouraging than we'd expected.

Here's a transcript for this episode.

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Transcript

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0:00.0	Hey there, I'm bringing back an episode we get in 2019 about insulin for a couple of reasons.
0:05.6	One is, holy crap, the story we tell in the first half of this episode of how insulin got
0:10.7	discovered and how it got to be so expensive, it's just a really important and really wild story.
0:17.6	And in a moment when COVID vaccines remind us how important it is, both to make medical breakthroughs
0:23.3	in a lab and to make sure that everybody can get access to them, it's got new resonance.
0:29.1	The other reason is, the second half of this episode looks at three ways that people who
0:33.6	need insulin have mobilized for what I'd now call self-defense against insulin's horrible price
0:38.9	in the US. That's got some extra resonance now too. We talk with three self-defense experts
0:44.8	in 2019 and I caught up with all of them in the last week, so stick around for that at the end
0:49.5	of this episode. All right, here we go.
0:59.9	Adelene Umabiae went to bed with that dinner a few weeks ago. It's the thing she does sometimes,
1:04.9	not because she can't afford food, because she can't afford insulin. She's a type one diabetic,
1:10.4	and if she skips dinner, she can skip it to us and be pretty sure she'll live through the night.
1:14.8	So that way I can save enough until I get my next paycheck so that I can also afford my rent,
1:20.8	my car note, this, that. Adelene's 25 and she does not have to do this kind of thing as often as she
1:26.4	did, like right after college, when she was interning with the startup. Now she works at a law firm,
1:31.2	and it's a good job with health insurance, but there's a deductible. So in June, she is still paying
1:36.6	for insulin herself, about $350 every four weeks. Adelene has known since she was a teenager that the
1:43.2	price of insulin was going to play a major role in her life after her dad died. We didn't really
1:48.0	have health insurance, you know, so me and my mom would go to, you know, the CVS and they were like,
1:55.2	you know, for her insulin, it's going to be $3,000. It was so heartbreaking. I think that's when I
2:03.0	really realized, oh, like I'm on my own. Like this wasn't something her mom could really protect her
	...

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