Hey there, I'm bringing back an episode we get in 2019 about insulin for a couple of reasons.

One is, holy crap, the story we tell in the first half of this episode of how insulin got

discovered and how it got to be so expensive, it's just a really important and really wild story.

And in a moment when COVID vaccines remind us how important it is, both to make medical breakthroughs

in a lab and to make sure that everybody can get access to them, it's got new resonance.

The other reason is, the second half of this episode looks at three ways that people who

need insulin have mobilized for what I'd now call self-defense against insulin's horrible price

in the US. That's got some extra resonance now too. We talk with three self-defense experts

in 2019 and I caught up with all of them in the last week, so stick around for that at the end

of this episode. All right, here we go.

Adelene Umabiae went to bed with that dinner a few weeks ago. It's the thing she does sometimes,

not because she can't afford food, because she can't afford insulin. She's a type one diabetic,

and if she skips dinner, she can skip it to us and be pretty sure she'll live through the night.

So that way I can save enough until I get my next paycheck so that I can also afford my rent,

my car note, this, that. Adelene's 25 and she does not have to do this kind of thing as often as she

did, like right after college, when she was interning with the startup. Now she works at a law firm,

and it's a good job with health insurance, but there's a deductible. So in June, she is still paying

for insulin herself, about $350 every four weeks. Adelene has known since she was a teenager that the

price of insulin was going to play a major role in her life after her dad died. We didn't really

have health insurance, you know, so me and my mom would go to, you know, the CVS and they were like,

you know, for her insulin, it's going to be $3,000. It was so heartbreaking. I think that's when I

really realized, oh, like I'm on my own. Like this wasn't something her mom could really protect her

...