The Price of Insulin is Too Damn High!

It should not cost you much money to buy life-sustaining medication. That statement should not be provocative or controversial. Yet in this time of skyrocketing profits for major corporations, people may cry 'socialism' and 'government overreach' when reading that. It's not socialism, it is simply good government. It is exactly the responsibility of government to regulate prices of medication along with other industries that have a direct impact on the lives and wellbeing of people.

It is easy enough to simply state that manufacturers are to blame; they make the insulin and will set the price. However, according to University of Southern California researchers, the net price of insulin - what the manufacturers of insulin make after accounting for expenditures to distributors, etc. - has actually decreased in recent years. Apparently, it's the distribution network, the so-called middlemen, who are to shoulder a majority of the blame in this price-gouging of a life-sustaining medication. Those middlemen include pharmacies, pharmacy benefit managers, and the wholesalers. They all take a larger share now than even 5 years ago while manufacturer's profit share has decreased.

This all means that while manufacturers of insulin may make less money than they have due to policy changes and regulation, the list price of insulin has risen over that same amount of time. In other words, no benefit to the consumer even after some manufacturing price caps. So the solution to this problem must entail more than just the manufacturers and a price cap on them. It must take in the entire network of insulin production and distribution.

The price of insulin is too high. Policymakers need to regularly address this and other life-sustaining medications with fair regulation. We might be better to simply put a maximum price any one entity can charge, depending on the drug, so to eliminate the price-gouging by the distributors and even pharmacy benefit managers.