The giant drug company Eli Lilly has reduced the price of its insulins to $35 (£27; €31) a month for the US’s eight million insulin dependent patients with diabetes, after campaigns by patients’ advocates and President Joe Biden. In 1923, the inventors of insulin sold their patent for $1 to save lives, not to make pharmaceutical executives extremely wealthy. Today, insulin costs just $8 to manufacture. Despite this, Eli Lilly has increased their insulin prices by 1,200 percent to $275 since 1996. Meanwhile, 1.3 million Americans were forced to ration insulin last year because of the unaffordable cost of this lifesaving drug. In the letters sent to Sanofi and Novo Nordisk – which along with Eli Lilly make up 90 percent of the insulin market in the U.S. – the HELP Committee Chairman Bernie Sanders called on the CEOs to follow Lilly’s example.
— source help.senate.gov | 03.01.2023