California to make its own insulin to cut high costs for diabetics | Healthy

In the video, Governor Newsom speaks of a clear market failure: “In California, we know that people shouldn’t go into debt to get life-saving drugs.” This statement is supported by scientific research.

A recent study by researchers at the prestigious Yale University shows that 14 percent of Americans who need insulin spend a “catastrophic” portion of their income on insulin. This concerns 40 percent of the income that remains after housing and food.

In 2019, other Yale researchers already concluded that an estimated one in four diabetics in the US uses less insulin than they need because of the high costs, for example by skipping a dose or using less insulin per dose than prescribed.

According to Newsom, insulin now costs many patients between 300 and 500 dollars (between 294 and 490 euros) per month. Yale researcher Kasia Lipska says the price of insulin in the US has more than doubled in the past ten years. “That’s not inflation, there’s a lot more going on,” she said in a press release.

In California, half of the available budget is used to produce a cheap form of insulin, the rest to start a production facility. It is not yet known when the insulin will become available for diabetes patients and at what price the drug will be sold.

According to the federal health agency CDC, 37.3 million Americans — 11.3 percent of the population — suffer from diabetes. 7 million of them need insulin daily. Another 96 million adult Americans have prediabetes, a precursor to type-2 diabetes.

According to the Diabetes Fund, 1.2 million people in the Netherlands have diabetes.