doctors: GOOD NEWS EVERYONE we have found a treatment for diabetes it’s called insulin! people won’t die from this illness anymore if we just give them insulin isn’t this great news?
united states of america: how about we make it so poor people have either limited to zero access to this insulin?
doctors: but don’t we have enough resources to provide for everyone in need of such a medication?
the united states of america: yes!
doctors: isn’t that genocide
united states of america: YES
united states of america fist pumping and chanting ‘U’ ‘S’ ‘A’:
capitalism is genocide
i usually don’t add to posts i reblog but as a type 1 diabetic this makes me so fucking angry.
i have an insulin pump. each time i change the port (basically what connects it to my body, similar to an iv) i use about a third of a bottle refilling the cartridge. i change it every three days, so one single, 10ml bottle of insulin lasts me around nine days.
i had to look this up because my parents don’t like to tell me how much my supplies cost. (for reasons like this. i feel guilty for my t1d. i shouldn’t have to feel guilty about an autoimmune disorder i was born with.)
you know how much it is for that one, single 10ml bottle of insulin, for those without any insurance?
$328.
for nine days.
$328 for a nine days supply of the medicine that i literally need to survive. the medicine that once i become an adult and have to take care of myself, i will have to pay for. the medicine that unless, by some miracle, they find a cure, i will need to take for the rest of my life. $328 for nine days of my life.
It’s the fucking dumbest thing. Human Insulin was one of the first products we made with genetic engineering back in the 1970s.
It should be DIRT CHEAP by now. The techniques used to make it are demonstrated in HIGH SCHOOLS (sure not at the scale and not the extraction and purification steps but still) It’s absolutely criminal to be charging this much
BTW, same goes for epinephrine pens! Epinephrine is biologic that we figured out how to synthesize with just CHEMICAL REACTIONS back in the early 1900s! We don’t even use bioreactors for it!!!