Between 2010 and 2015 Lilly increased the price of Humulin R U-500 by 325%. If you don't have anything significant in the pipeline, I guess that's how you make your money.
The truth hurts..............................................
Insulin has been around for almost a century. The World Health Organization considers it an essential medicine, which means it should be available “at a price the individual and the community can afford.” So why is this product increasingly too expensive for many Americans?
In the United States, just three pharmaceutical giants hold patents that allow them to manufacture insulin: Eli Lilly, Sanofi and Novo Nordisk. Put together, the “big three” made more than $12 billion in profits in 2014, with insulin accounting for a large portion.
What makes this so worrisome is that the big three have simultaneously hiked their prices. From 2010 to 2015, the price of Lantus (made by Sanofi) went up by 168 percent; the price of Levemir (made by Novo Nordisk) rose by 169 percent; and the price of Humulin R U-500 (made by Eli Lilly) soared by 325 percent.
To make insulin affordable, we need more competition. Nothing would do this faster than a “generic” form of insulin. (Technically, because insulin is made using bacteria, it should be referred to as a “biosimilar” instead of a “generic.”) Unfortunately, there isn’t one available in the United States.
This is true, in no small part, because the big three have cleverly extended the lives of their patents, making incremental “improvements” to their insulin. It’s not clear whether the newer insulin products are significantly safer or more effective than their predecessors, yet the strategy has been effective: There is no generic insulin, and over 90 percent of privately insured patients with Type 2 diabetes who are prescribed insulin get the newer and more expensive products.
