Meanwhile, 10 euros per vial here in Europe. At least his original plan for widespread and easy availability has partially succeeded.
In civilized countries at least.
In brazil 36 reais (about 6 euro). The US is a joke. (And im 99% sure you can also get it for free if you use the public health network)
I have mental health disabilities in the USA and my meds are at zero cost because I literally have had absolute zero income for the past 5 years.
You wouldn't believe how much those mood stabilizer/antidepressant cocktails stack up proportionally when I was able to scrape by on $15 an hour.
The system set me up to fail with how shitty it is, if healthcare wasn't crap I could be contributing to society without crippling myself.
Canadians: invented drug and patent it freely
Americans: Finds way to kill the most people possible while making the most amount of money
To be fair, the killing isn't the point; they're the product. Its just that profit is God, so killing in its name is justified.
Killing poors for the joy of it? That's just an evil bonus.
I’m not diabetic and the situation with insulin fills me with a white hot rage.
Remember Remember the 4th of December 
Making an AI meme of Luigi as a Saint is one thing.
Making a painting and having it casually displayed in your room is a whole other level.
Also, I can't believe it's already been a year.
Yea I guess but my mom was destroyed by our cruel and heartless system. She’s gone now but painting this helped me reconnect with the glimmer of hope we all felt for a moment after this happened. It also helped process the trauma I myself went through as her caregiver not being able to access what she needed
I wonder if all the sane Americans did a mass exodus to Canada, Europe, UK, Australia etc, what effect that would have
A lot of us would need financial sponsorship. So there'd be a literal financial drain on those economies.
I still would like to sign up.
Not if you stayed, then it’s an investment. Money doesn’t just disappear when goes to poor people, they use it to buy things like food and stuff. It would only be a financial drain if you were sending that money back home.
The North American mind cannot comprehend the benefits of supporting the poor.
Perhaps strain would be a better word than drain - it would still be a short-mid term financial burden to take even a tiny fraction of the sane population from the US, it's a big country. Sure would be nice if it could be arranged though...
Have you looked into what it takes to get a permanent visa to one of those countries? It’s not easy.
California is contracting its own insulin supply and it'll be available for $11 a pen starting Jan 1, 2026. I know not every state can or are willing to do this but just throwing out some examples and hopefully optimism to somehow fight the American decline from within it. We're in a unique position as our state economy is larger than most countries but I am hopeful we will throw our weight around to counter the bs. https://www.chhs.ca.gov/blog/2025/10/17/governor-newsom-announces-affordable-calrx-insulin-11-a-pen-will-soon-be-available-for-purchase/
Please support the Open Insulin Foundation who are creating an open source model for insulin production! Such an important project!
I genuinely think that in some third world countries, as part of the middle class, you can have a better life than in the USA.
Naive question from a european: Aren't there companies on the market who can offer a cheaper price and therefore beat greedy competitors?
the problem is that there is natural (as in, unmodified) cheap generic insulin available, it's just that it sucks compared to everything else. you see, insulin is a peptide that is supposed to appear, do some signalling, then disappear and unmodified insulin copies this thing exactly. the problem is, most of the time when peptide is supposed to work as a pharmaceutical, you don't want to do that, you'd like insulin to last longer than usual, which means changes to it that make breakdown slower, or adding something that makes it stick to albumin, which has similar effect because it hides insulin somewhere enzymes can't reach it and also it makes it start acting slower. this means less frequent dosing and less changes in insulin activity over time. there are also other insulins that start acting faster than natural, and this is also due to a couple of modifications in its structure
for another example, ozempic was not the first drug in its class, it's also a modified peptide, and it can be injected s.c. once a week, compared to previous iteration (liraglutide) that requires daily injections. if natural peptide is injected i.m. instead, its halflife is half an hour, and in serum it's only two minutes (it gets released a bit slower than it is metabolized)
manufacturing costs are about the same for any variant, most of it is in purification. patents for a couple of these have expired anyway by now, but if manufacturing is limited then price can be set arbitrarily high (see daraprim)
Oh wow, an actual nuanced response and genuine answer!
Also today I learned!
Welcome to USA, I guess.
In other countries, you could probably completely fill a fridge with insulin for $800.
If he wanted it to be freely available, why did he even sell the patent ? Just disclaim at the patent office. Selling is just asking the new holder to start enforcing.
They sold the patent to the University of Toronto, so they didn't exactly sell it to a for-profit patent troll.
But also, that was in 1923, so the patent has long since expired.
They also don't make insulin the way that he did back then. Not justifying the price hike cause the way its made now is way cheaper than it was with the old method (which was basically grinding up animal parts to extract insulin). These fucks are just profiting off of the suffering of Americans who have literally no choice but to use their drug.
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