Logically, it's not about how much money you make, it's about purchasing power. It is irrelevant if you earn only $400 a month when you can eat well for $1 and pay $100 for your housing, you have free health care and education. That is the reality in some third world countries.

I can confirm, as a insured I am paying $0.00 for Insulin in Macedonia. Now I am receiving 6 Novo Nordisk Tresiba pens per month. How much is that in US?

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.

In civilized countries at least.

Even worst, my dog got it for free from the public vet university for years. They even gave us the syringes. It's the same human insulin and my dog got it for free. Guess his plan worked better than he thought... only no in the us

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)

Free on the NHS in the UK. In fact, diabetes is one of the conditions that qualifies people for free prescriptions across the board.

Free Luigi.

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.

Insulin is not permanently shelf stable, and will still expire in the fridge.

Diabetics usually start with a long-acting insulin to keep blood sugar from naturally rising plus a fast-acting insulin for corrections and to compensate for food.

The old style of just giving 2 long-acting shots of mixed insulin is mostly obsolete, except for legacy patients, some pregnant patients, and other special cases I can only theorize.

A good number of diabetics only use fast acting insulin in a pump, receiving microdoses every minute.

To switch brands of insulin, much less therapies in any circumstance requires a doctor's visit.

With all that said, the insurance company will often replace a medication in the event of an accident, typically only once a year.

Without that, a patient might be able to find a charity they will assist them.

You also may be able to travel to the next state over where the cost of insulin is regulated.

Failing all other options, it is better to check yourself in to the hospital as your sugar begins to rise and tell them that you cannot control your blood sugar.

The old formulas you can buy OTC for $25 are more inconvenient to use, but will indeed keep you from dying. The main difference between the R insulin and Novolog/Humalog are how quickly they act. Novolog starts lowering your glucose in about 60 minutes while the R takes 2 hours. Dietary management is not related to which insulin you’re using, at least for type 1. The long acting substitute, NPH, is a lot more difficult to use than Lantus though. It still works. I ran out of good insulin on a trip last year and had to sub the R and NPH and did have some issues with hypoglycemia. I’m more qualified to swap them on my own than many people though (lots of people are not informed enough to change their dosage without professional medical advice).

So yes, the claim that OOP’s only alternative to paying $800 was to die is not true.

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.

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)