25 Aug Slate: Good Lord. Even the Price of Insulin Is Skyrocketing.
At this point, it’s getting hard to keep track of all the stories of drug companies jacking up the prices of prescription medications to nauseating heights for little identifiable reason other than the fact that, unlike in other developed countries, the U.S. government lets them. At the moment, Congress is getting exercised over EpiPens, the fast-acting epinephrine injectors made by Mylan that are used to stop potentially deadly allergy attacks. (I carry one myself, because bees.) Mylan has upped EpiPen prices by 400 percent since it bought the decades-old device from Merck in 2007. The company says the moves are justified by “product improvements,” a line that presumably even they couldn’t possibly believe. Sen. Chuck Grassley some questions.
On Wednesday I noticed yet another disturbing story about drug prices—one that, despite some coverage in the New York Times and elsewhere, hasn’t become a national scandal quite on the order of the EpiPen or the adventures of Martin Shkreli. It turns out that the cost of insulin, which diabetics rely on to stabilize their blood sugar, has been going through the roof. A study published by the Journal of the American Medical Association in April found that between 2002 and 2013, insulin’s cost had leapt by more than 200 percent, from $231 to $736 per patient annually.
