30k updoots: Governor Gavin Newsom announces California will make its own insulin

article: California is diving into the prescription drug business, attempting to achieve what no other state has done: produce its own brand of generic insulin and sell it at below-market prices

Caudillo said she feels like a “prisoner” to the three major pharmaceutical companies that control the price of insulin, which ranges from $300 to $400 per vial without insurance.

To start, the goal is to dramatically slash insulin prices and make it available to “millions of Californians” via pharmacies, retail stores and mail order, said Dr. Mark Ghaly, secretary of the California Health and Human Services Agency.

But state health officials are still negotiating a contract with a drug manufacturer to make and distribute insulin and have not answered key questions such as how cheaply insulin could be produced and what patients would pay. https://archive.ph/vDlCv

How the insulin market actually works, and why this plan will fail:

There are two kinds of insulin: (1) expensive new, innovative brands which offer greater convenience, and (2) cheap generic brands outside of patent protection which lack the conveniences of the new stuff.

Wal-Mart has been selling cheap insulin for decades: "More than two decades ago, Walmart launched a human insulin private label brand called ReliOn that costs $24.99 a vial." Starting in 2021, Wal-Mart began offering a generic of the more advanced technology ReliOn NovoLog at $72.88 per vial.

If the generic brands sold by Wal-Mart sell for $24.99 (old tech) and $72.88 (new tech), why is it that the LA Times is saying that insulin costs "$300 to $400 per vial"? Because they're lying. Newer, patented, more advanced versions of insulin do, in fact, cost a lot of money, which isn't a problem for the vast majority of people because their insurance covers it, but you don't HAVE to use the newest, leading edge brands. Cheaper options are available, and have been for decades.

It's just that the existence of the cheaper brands sharply undercuts the libtard propaganda on insulin, so they always pretend it does not exist. Every time I have rubbed the libtard faces in ReliOn when insulin comes up, their response is always the same: that ReliOn might as well be rat poison and kills people. In truth, it's the same drug, it's just slightly less convenient to use because of the delivery mechanism.

Here is a chart of updated insulin prices for 2022. & here is the source You can see how "Wal-Mart" insulin is already incredibly cheap, at 3 cents per unit for human insulin, and 6 cents per unit for insulin aspart, which is a newer synthetic insulin.

Note that TRUE human insulin is what is the cheapest. The "expensive" insulin is all the synthetic modified versions that are not actually the kind your body naturally makes.

So basically, California isn't going to accomplish anything that Wal-Mart hasn't already accomplished on its own since decades ago. The only way that California is going to get prices any cheaper, is if it cheats and uses taxpayer funds to lower the price through artificial subsidies, which it will inevitably do, since at a minimum its going to pass all overhead admin/distribution costs off onto the taxpayer.