What Price Life? Part Two

December 12th, 2018 by Tom Lynch

Part Two

“Insulin is my gift to mankind” – Frederick Banting

In Part One, we noted the critical need for daily insulin injections to keep Type 1 Diabetics (T1Ds) alive. We described how Frederick Banting’s team of himself, Charles Best and James Collip recovered and purified insulin from the fetal pancreases of cows and pigs in 1922, how they successfully tested it on humans, how Banting won the Nobel Prize the following year for his discovery, how the team sold the patent for the discovery to the University of Toronto for $3.00 and how they and the University agreed to license the manufacturing rights to pharmaceutical companies royalty-free, because, in Banting’s words, “Insulin is my gift to mankind.” The team and the university wanted to incentivise drug companies to improve on the Banting team’s discovery, so the University and Banting agreed to allow the companies to improve Banting’s formulation if they could and patent any new discoveries that arose. Their hope was that drug companies would share their vision of making it possible for T1Ds to live high-quality lives and to keep insulin prices low to help them do it.

Immediately after the sale of the patent to the University of Toronto, the University licensed the manufacturing rights for insulin to Eli Lilly and Company, located in Indianapolis, Indianna, and Nordisk Insulin laboratorium in Copenhagen. Meanwhile, a few kilometers away in Copenhagen, Novo Terapeutisk Laboratorium succeeded in producing a stable liquid insulin product which it called Insulin Novo. Decades later, in 1989, these two companies would merge to become Novo Nordisk.

In the beginning, the pharmaceutical companies had the best of intentions. After all, they were manufacturing and marketing the world’s first “life-saving” drug.

Over time, the “best intentions” became the quarterly bottom line and shareholder value. The emphasis was now on next generation patents, which would stifle competition and prevent the emergence of insulin generic drugs. To this day, there isn’t one.

It is not an exaggeration to say insulin made Eli Lilly and Company and Novo Nordisk two of the top pharmaceutical companies in the world. It also hasn’t hurt the bottom line of Sanofi, the company that rounds out the insulin producing triumvirate and is the world’s fifth largest pharma by sales.

In the last 20 years, these insulin producing companies have become swept up in the craziness of U.S. health care, where prices are on a rocket ride to the moon. During that time, the list price of insulin has increased more than 700%. Of course, T1Ds who have employer sponsored health insurance don’t pay list price. The price they pay, which is much lower, is  negotiated by their insurance company or Pharmacy Benefit Manager. This also applies to T1Ds who have secured insurance either through the expansion of the Affordable Care Act or some other means. They find their insulin relatively affordable, unless they have a prescription deductible which forces them to pay the full amount for insulin until they reach the deductible total. Finally, diabetics on Part D must pay 45% of list price when they fall into the infamous “donut hole.”

But children without insurance are in a very bad place, and there are a lot of them – 3.9 million in 2017 under the age of 19 (300 thousand more than 2016).

This situation is worse, twice as worse, in states that have not expanded Medicaid through the Affordable Care Act.

Kids with Type 1 Diabetes make up about .05%, of the uninsured group. That’s 195,000 children. And then there are the young, T1D adults who can no longer be on their parents insurance plan, because they are over the age of 26. Recently, we have learned of  T1Ds who have been forced to ration their insulin. This has resulted in tragic deaths. Parents and guardians have begun to protest at pharmaceutical company gates, some carrying the ashes of their dead children. Think about that.

So, here’s a question: Should anyone in the United States who requires a daily drug just to stay alive be forced to come up with the money to pay for it? Or, should that be a government-sponsored, health care right, as in the Declaration Of Independence’s “self-evident…unalienable right…to life.”

While you ponder that, I’ll leave you with this. Banting, Best and Collip would be tremendously gratified that their “gift to mankind” has enabled millions upon millions of Type 1 diabetics to lead productive, fulfilling lives. But they would be horrified that the drug’s price is now exacting a human price of obscene proportions.

 

 

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