Three international companies make insulin. Yet we are getting screwed.
The prices for insulin have skyrocket in the last decade. Seemingly in lockstep.
Novo Nordisk (Danish), Sanofi (French), Eli Lilly (US) make all the insulin. Where is the competition? Sounds more like collusion.
“One of the types of insulin used by Antavia was Lantus, the leading drug for people with Type 1 diabetes in the United States, which is manufactured by French pharmaceutical company Sanofi.
Without insurance, one five-pen carton of Lantus costs about $280 in the United States. The exact same carton costs about €45 ($50.60) in most pharmacies in France.”
France has a universal system that is a mix of public and private. Ironically, that is kind of what we have with Medicare and Medicaid and VA.
The difference is that Americans can’t afford the system we have now, which costs more than the French one. And the travesty of low income diabetics having to risk rationing is a side effect.
And, of course the irony is that the French company making Lantus gets away with charging Americans more than anyone else.
The word “CHUMP” must be tattooed on our backs.
The battleground here is all about health insurance. When it is the costs, or prices really, of drugs, hospitals, providers, devices that drives premiums. And this is in addition to the incredibly complex private insurance negotiations, coding, paperwork requirements. And the need to boost quarterly profits for the shareholder owned insurance companies.
Talk about “death panels”.
Tidewater News and Opinion Forum 
Insulin has been off-patent for almost 100 years. For 40 years, its manufacture using recombinate DNA technology has been cheap. The cost to manufacture a month’s supply is about $9. So why so expensive in the US?
There are 102 brands of insulin made by 23 manufacturers worldwide, but only 3 are licensed by the FDA in the US.
Again, this is not a market problem, it is a regulation problem.
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That does not explain why the exact same long acting insulin cost cost 6 times as much here as in France.
Your stats on the number of companies and labels available worldwide is a bit misleading. Not all insulins are alike or the proper choices for type 1 diabetes
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Of course it explains it. It doesn’t excuse it but it explains it.
Certainly not all insulins are alike. The biggest difference is duration of action. But if there is only 1 long acting insulin on the licensed by the FDA, they can charge more for it than if there are ten choices.
You do have alternatives. the shorter duration insulins are cheaper, the difference is one of convenience. But absent the restrictive licensing of generics, there would be more competition at all levels.
A 1000% profit margin will attract A LOT of competition if government isn’t trying to control the market.
Inspection for purity and bioequivalence is all that the FDA should be doing(and the pharmacist’s insurers could do that better)
Other than that let the market do its thing.
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