Wait, is insulin cheaper now?
An Arm and a Leg
An Arm and a Leg
4.8 • 1.1K Ratings
🗓️ 8 February 2024
⏱️ 25 minutes
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Summary
A listener wrote to us at the beginning of the year with a query, “I was just reading the news about the price of insulin going down to $35! Is that for everyone?”
It turns out, there is a lot of good news about the so-called “poster child” for the high cost of prescription drugs. But to say it costs $35 now is an oversimplification – and diabetes activists don’t think this fight is over.
Senior producer and self-proclaimed “insulin correspondent” Emily Pisacreta took a hard look at the recent developments.
Plus, what does the explosion of drugs like Ozempic and Wegovy have to do with the price of insulin? We break it down.
Here’s a transcript of this episode.
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Transcript
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| 0:00.0 | Hey there, right after the holidays, I got an email from a listener named Brianna, |
| 0:04.8 | and it started, happy New Year Dan. I was just reading the news about the price of insulin |
| 0:10.0 | going down to $35. Is that for everyone? And I was like, huh, I mean, I had a sense there was some news about the price of insulin, |
| 0:19.3 | but $35 a month for everyone. |
| 0:23.0 | That's not like a big reduction in, you know, big news. |
| 0:27.0 | And I Google the latest stories and I wasn't totally sure what I was seeing. |
| 0:32.0 | I was definitely seeing some new stories |
| 0:34.4 | about people paying 35 bucks from here on out and there seemed to be some federal |
| 0:38.3 | law involved in politicians were patting themselves in the back but it just wasn't |
| 0:42.1 | totally clear. Was insulin now $35 for everyone? I mean, did the |
| 0:49.6 | outrageous price of insulin get solved while I wasn't looking? And I mean I've kind of been |
| 0:55.0 | looking. We've done a couple of episodes about the price of insulin already because |
| 0:58.8 | insulin is iconic. It represents the wild cost of prescription drugs in this country. More than |
| 1:05.5 | 8 million Americans take insulin to treat their diabetes and for some going |
| 1:10.2 | without it could actually kill you. |
| 1:12.7 | And insulin's price got jacked up so much, |
| 1:15.1 | like huge multiples over 10 years, |
| 1:17.2 | that one in four of those people who could not go without |
| 1:21.9 | took to rationing, seeing how much they could go without, short of actually |
| 1:26.0 | dying. So I asked our senior producer, Emily P. C. C. C. |
| 1:30.0 | To take on the case. I feel more like the senior insulin correspondent, which is fine with me as the resident |
| 1:35.7 | type 1 diabetic, and a lot has happened since the last time we talked about insulin on this show, so we really do need an update. |
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