Diabetes Patients Suffer Unregulated and Commercially Unnecessary Insulin Price Hikes

Though it’s been on the market for many years for relatively cheap, a single month-long dose of the insulin variety Humulin, manufactured by Eli Lily, costs $1,200 today—more than five times the amount in 2007. Why? Because the company can charge that much, Eli Lily’s marketing director said.

As an old drug that enjoys the monopoly advantage of being the only version of its kind available, Eli Lily has spent zero additional dollars on research and development. The price increase led to pure profits at no cost to the company.

Amber Taylor, MD, director of The Diabetes Center at Mercy Medical Center in Baltimore, told the medical news service MedPage Today about the impact of the hike on her patients: “I’ve had patients with a $2,500 deductible who can’t put down $1,200 for a bottle of insulin. … For them, it’s pay the mortgage or buy my insulin—what do you want me to do?”

MedPage Today asked Eli Lily why the price on Humulin U-500, which is taken by less than five percent of diabetes patients, rose at all. In an article published Sep. 11, the service reported:

Kevin Cammack, senior director of marketing for insulin at Eli Lilly, told MedPage Today that their sales representatives started getting more questions from doctors about U-500 over the last 5 years. As that demand rose, they began to educate all of their representatives about their concentrated insulin.

“Our product had been available and its use increased without promotion essentially,” Cammack told MedPage Today. “Once [physicians] asked enough sales reps about it … we stepped up and provided more information.”

That’s also when the company started to increase the price. Cammack said the per-unit cost was raised to equal that of its regular human insulin, Humulin U-100—hence the equivalent $0.12 per unit of insulin cost for both drugs.

“We felt it was probably appropriate to allow U-500 to be priced the same as other human insulins in the marketplace,” Cammack said.

The marketing man’s choice of words is marvelous. He doesn’t say, “We realized we could make more money off of these suffering bastards, so we did,” but instead, after dutifully “stepping up” to provide physicians with information they needed, and realizing that the demand of consumers could support a rise in cost, the company “felt it… appropriate to allow” the price to rise. How nobly-minded according to the neoliberal principle that corporate profits take precedence over the health and financial wellbeing of Americans.

Protecting patients from such harmful manipulations was not a part of the much-lauded (among Democrats) 2010 Affordable Care Act, President Barack Obama’s landmark health insurance legislation. In its report on the hike in the drug price, MedPage Today went on to confirm that there are no regulations preventing drug companies from raising prices solely because they can.

“I am not aware of any laws that would prevent a pharmaceutical company from doubling the price of insulin,” Kate Greenwood, JD, a pharmaceutical law expert at Seton Hall University in New Jersey, told the service. “There are statutes and regulations governing the price that pharmaceutical companies can charge Medicare, Medicaid, and other government programs,” but “[t]hese laws do not put a cap on the market price of a drug or drugs.”

—Posted by Alexander Reed Kelly.

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