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The company’s announcement follows a long battle by US President Joe Biden to regulate drug prices. The decision also includes setting a cap of $35 on some of its most popular products, a limit that would only apply to citizens with private insurance.
“Eli Lilly is taking this action to facilitate access to Lilly insulins and to help Americans who may have difficulty navigating a complex healthcare system, which may prevent them from getting insulin at a reasonable price,” the pharmacist said in a statement. release this March 1st.
The price cut targets the most widely prescribed insulin, Humalog, which currently retails for $274.70. With the decision, the dose will drop to $66.40, making the drug more accessible to the more than eight million insulin users in the country, according to figures from the American Diabetes Association.
The measure also benefits users who cannot afford private insurance, as prices for vials of generic insulin drop to $25. Currently, this type of medication costs $82.41 per dose.
According to a study from Yale Universitythe medicine represents more than 40% of the post-subsistence income – the one that remains after paying rent and food – for the 14% of insulin-dependent Americans.
The cut could prevent thousands of people from stopping their treatments with the drug because they cannot afford the substance.
The fight for price regulation
“This is a great development, and it is time for other manufacturers to follow suit,” Joe Biden said in a statement about Eli Lilly’s decision. During his two-year term, the Democratic president has been vocal in exposing the need to regulate the price of insulin.
However, the president has not been the only one who has exposed such a need. Political figures such as Bernie Sanders and Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez have spoken out on multiple occasions in favor of exponentially lowering the price of the drug.
“Drugmakers may be seeing that high prices can’t go on forever,” said Larry Levitt, vice president of the nonprofit Kaiser Family Foundation, an institute that studies U.S. health care. They have been pioneers in the fight to reduce medicine prices in the country.
According to figures from the American Diabetes Association, there are approximately 30 million US citizens with diabetes. Eight million of them depend on daily doses of insulin, a hormone that began to be widely used in the 1990s and initially cost $21 per vial.
Lilly recorded more than three trillion dollars in profit from the sale of insulin in 2022.
Today, the lack of price regulation and the high costs of health security in the North American country have caused the cost of medicine to skyrocket exponentially, but pressure from different fronts achieved a victory for the insulin-dependent population. .
With Reuters and AP
