This 24-Year-Old Diabetic Is Saving Lives the Government Won’t

The Daily Beast Podcast

The Daily Beast

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4.6 • 8.4K Ratings

🗓️ 27 December 2020

⏱️ 17 minutes

🔗️ Recording | iTunes | RSS

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Summary

Twenty-four-year-old Madelyn Corwin’s social media feeds feature a few selfies, videos of her insulin pump, and almost always a link to a GoFundMe page. The most current fundraiser is to raise money for a woman named Nicole who lost her diabetic son in 2018 because they couldn’t afford insulin. In other words, Corwin’s pages are not just young people fodder. Her activism is literally saving lives. “I just make a statement and I'll have people message me on Twitter or Instagram and be like, ‘thanks so much for posting about this, my dad died like three years ago,’” she tells co-host Molly Jong-Fast in this bonus episode of The New Abnormal. Corwin works with the organization Mutual Aid to raise awareness for a healthcare crisis most non-Diabetics wouldn’t otherwise know about: the insanely high costs of insulin and the Americans who are dying as a result. “[People] kind of just think like, Oh, like, you know, like Joe wasn't taking care of himself, but in reality, like Joe literally couldn't afford to take care of himself.” Without insurance, insulin (which is mainly distributed in the United States by three major companies) can cost up to $1000. Some states do have cop-pay caps, says Corwin, but she cited research that found they only help up to 27% of people on the drug in each state. “I believe in ‘96 it was like around 20 us dollars,” she says, but that rate has doubled in just the last five years. “But once it started hitting like 2011, 2012, it was like hitting those $200 a vile marks. People were like, okay, well, like something's going on?” Lobbying is a thing, but it hasn’t made much of a dent. Now, they stick to financial crowdsourcing, education and accountability. In the meantime, the #insulinforall community are deciding what the next move is: “I mean, I guess in like a dream world, I want everyone to be able to get insulin for free, but we live in the United States,” says Corwin. Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices

Transcript

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0:00.0	Hi and welcome to another the new abnormal member exclusive episodes and we thank you so much for being here.
0:07.2	We have a very special guest with Madeline Corwin who is someone I met a long time ago.
0:13.8	She's a young girl, she's 24, she's a type one diabetic and for the last couple of years she has worked on trying to make sure that no one ever dies from not being able to afford their insulin.
0:25.6	Tell me how you got started in this world. So I've had type one diabetes for nine years, almost 10.
0:36.6	And I didn't have like a community of people. I didn't even know one existed really.
0:41.4	How old were you when you were diagnosed? I was 14.
0:45.6	Okay, so you're 24 now? Yeah, I just turned 24 a few days ago.
0:49.1	Okay.
0:50.1	Yeah, and I didn't know there was a community at all until last year the Instagram explore page for some reason.
0:56.1	Like it was starting to give me people with diabetes maybe because like my Google searches and it was just like recommending me things.
1:03.6	And I found a girl that was like really pretty and she had an insulin pump and I started like following her and then eventually I ended up like making my own kind of diabetes Instagram account.
1:14.6	Right.
1:15.6	She was up her accounts and then like it was almost immediately that like I fell in with like the right people I guess.
1:22.1	Like I fell in with like people that were really focused on insulin legislation and like mutual aid and stuff like that because it's like.
1:30.6	It's such a loud issue here. You would think that like all diabetics would care about it, but yeah, that's not really the truth.
1:37.6	It's it's a large community, but there are people who just like completely.
1:41.6	I don't know if they're ignored or like they don't know or like they're not affected by it, but that was basically how I got into it.
1:48.6	So explain to me what you saw when you started doing this diabetes activism.
1:55.1	I started on Instagram, which is nice, but you don't get like as big of reach as Twitter for whatever reason when it comes to this type of stuff.
2:04.6	And also there are I guess there are less people. It seems there are less people in need on Instagram because you know Twitter you can just like post but on Instagram people aren't going to like post like.
2:14.6	I need insulin like that. It's just not the format of Instagram.
2:17.6	So I moved to Twitter last September and that was kind of when I met even more like people that were way deeper into doing this kind of stuff and befriend them.
	...

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