ISSUES WITH INSULIN

Everyone needs insulin to survive. For those living with diabetes, who cannot produce their own, it's a costly expense in order to survive.

On Thursday, Gov. Gavin Newson announced the state will set aside $100 million from its $308 billion 202223 budget to develop an affordable version of the drug

and a manufacturing facility based in California "$50 million will go towards the development of low-cost insulin products and an additional $50 million will go towards a California-based insulin manufacturing facility that will provide new, high-paying jobs and a stronger supply chain for the drug," Newsom said. Among Americans who use insulin, 14.1%, or about 1.2 million people, were found to spend at least 40% of what's left of their income, after paying for food and housing, on the drug alone, according to the study. According to the Mayo Clinic, the most commonly used forms of analog insulin cost 10 times more in the U.S. than in any other developed country. “Insulin costs about $10 a vial to make, that's what it costs the — the pharmaceutical company," President Joe Biden said, “But drug companies charge families... up to 30 times that amount.”

The price of insulin has risen over the past 20 years in the U.S., at a rate far higher than the rate of inflation. One vial of Humalog (insulin lispro), which cost $21 in 1999, cost $332 in 2019. In contrast, insulin prices in other developed countries, including Canada, have stayed the same.

According to the U.S. House Oversight and Reform Committee's Drug Pricing Investigation released in 2019, just three drug companies make up 90% of the global insulin market. But the manufacturers sell at wholesale prices and are not in total to blame for the skyrocketing costs. The people impacted the most are the uninsured, some Medicare patients or people with a high deductible. Insulin from cattle and pigs was used for many years to treat diabetes and saved millions of lives, but it wasn't perfect, as it caused allergic reactions in many patients. The first genetically engineered, synthetic “human” insulin was produced in 1978 using E. coli bacteria to produce the insulin. Pharmaceutical company Eli Lilly went on in 1982 to sell the first commercially available biosynthetic human insulin under the brand name Humulin.