Meanwhile, 10 euros per vial here in Europe. At least his original plan for widespread and easy availability has partially succeeded.
In civilized countries at least.
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)
I have mental health disabilities in the USA and my meds are at zero cost because I literally have had absolute zero income for the past 5 years.
You wouldn’t believe how much those mood stabilizer/antidepressant cocktails stack up proportionally when I was able to scrape by on $15 an hour.
The system set me up to fail with how shitty it is, if healthcare wasn’t crap I could be contributing to society without crippling myself.
Canadians: invented drug and patent it freely
Americans: Finds way to kill the most people possible while making the most amount of money
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.
I’m not diabetic and the situation with insulin fills me with a white hot rage.
the OOC might be TYPE 1 which is even more dependant on insulin than type 2, because you’re pancreas cant make any insulin at all. plus there also other expenses that comes with being type 1. CGM, INSULIN pumps(which are often regularly replaced because they wear out). you can sometimes tell when someones type 1, if they have a device attached to thier arm, its usually a circular button, thats the sensor(its another cost)
Please support the Open Insulin Foundation who are creating an open source model for insulin production! Such an important project!
this feels a bit like open source software, just that the software involved is genetic code, which codes for a protein.
It is! They’re trying to “compile” insulin on the smaller scale. Not home labs but local production. They haven’t managed it yet but I believe they will eventually.
If you talk about killing the few people like these that are the root cause of all these problems, you’re a terrorist. You go to jail
These people actually kill people by the thousands, millions, and we call them smart CEO’s and celebrate them 🥂
Free Luigi.
There is plenty of propaganda on social media to exalt the billionaires and CEOs. Instagram is especially really bad at it. I don’t know why the algorithm suggest heavily to me about “entrepreneur” pages (maybe my investing platform sold my data), although some of these pages whitewash literal fraudulent and underhanded behaviours from celebrity CEOs and fraudsters, spinning their past behaviours as “another way to get rich”. I also think the posts and profiles were written by bots, because the language and syntax used sound almost identical from one another, in spite of these profiles supposedly being independent from one another.
Remember Remember the 4th of December
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.
Yea I guess but my mom was destroyed by our cruel and heartless system. She’s gone now but painting this helped me reconnect with the glimmer of hope we all felt for a moment after this happened. It also helped process the trauma I myself went through as her caregiver not being able to access what she needed
I am so, so sorry about your loss. I’m glad to hear that you were able to feel a beacon of hope last year, and that this painting was a way for you to cling on to it and feel it a little longer. I hope you find a way to keep holding on to it, and through that hope find the courage to not give up and try to support change instead whenever you can and have the strength and energy to do so. But I can’t even imagine how hard that must be. And most of all, carry the love you had for your mom in your heart despite the grief, and the disgust and hate for the system that led to her demise quicker than it had to be.
I hope you don’t mind if I save that picture of yours.
Thank you for the kind words yes no problem
Symbols are powerful things. I’m not an American, but something that surprised me with Mangione was how people on the left and the right seemed to support him. It was a rare case of example of political unity amongst regular people.
Yeah I noticed this too
It was incredible how right wing pundits were so disconnected from their audience, trying to promote outrage while their audience would have been popping champaign of they could afford it
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Naive question from a european: Aren’t there companies on the market who can offer a cheaper price and therefore beat greedy competitors?
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)
Costs aren’t just research and purification, it’s also good manufacturing practice and quality control.
Oh wow, an actual nuanced response and genuine answer!
Also today I learned!
Responses don’t need to be nuanced to be useful.
Yeah, alright buttnugget.
Alright Caroline
???
Since your comment was entirely superfluous, I just replied in that same spirit.
It is widely available, just not in the US
California is contracting its own insulin supply and it’ll be available for $11 a pen starting Jan 1, 2026. I know not every state can or are willing to do this but just throwing out some examples and hopefully optimism to somehow fight the American decline from within it. We’re in a unique position as our state economy is larger than most countries but I am hopeful we will throw our weight around to counter the bs. https://www.chhs.ca.gov/blog/2025/10/17/governor-newsom-announces-affordable-calrx-insulin-11-a-pen-will-soon-be-available-for-purchase/
contracting is an interesting choice of word since it could mean decreasing
That’s called a homophone.
I wonder if all the sane Americans did a mass exodus to Canada, Europe, UK, Australia etc, what effect that would have
I did it a while ago, would recommend.
Aren’t you still paying taxes to the USA? Just curious.
You still have to file, but you don’t need to pay taxes unless you’re earning enough that the visa won’t be a problem.
But, like, if you close everything out and never go back…
The IRS will still find you lol
But then what?
Is a foreign government going to extradite you for missing paperwork and no outstanding tax debts (especially because everyone else thinks it’s nuts that we require nonresident citizens to file taxes)? I guess it’s possible, but it strikes me as very unlikely.
But if you’re still financially attached to the US/likely to visit, they’ve got some power over you.
I’m not a lawyer or an accountant (obviously. This is not best practices)
I hear ya but I wouldn’t put it past the government. You’re now a bargaining chip in future negotiations
You have to earn over something like 100k+ for the US to tax you. Salaries are lower here.
Ohhhh that’s interesting.
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.
Not if you stayed, then it’s an investment. Money doesn’t just disappear when goes to poor people, they use it to buy things like food and stuff. It would only be a financial drain if you were sending that money back home.
The North American mind cannot comprehend the benefits of supporting the poor.
Perhaps strain would be a better word than drain - it would still be a short-mid term financial burden to take even a tiny fraction of the sane population from the US, it’s a big country. Sure would be nice if it could be arranged though…
Don’t worry, there aren’t that many sane people in the US. A lot of them are under the impression that they’re sane because they take the “balanced” position, though, which is to say that they just choose whatever’s in between fascism and barely progressive policy while they call themselves intelligent.
Frankly I’m not sure I’d want a bunch of people who cannot take accountability and who have such main-character energy they think that they would be allowed in while “bad” people wouldn’t be. We have enough problems with similar mindsets here in Canada and I really don’t want more of that except now they’re making it even harder to get away from our useless, conservative, Liberal(capital L) party.
Ah yes - subjecting ideological refugeess to arbitrary purity tests, a true classic.
For Australian diabetes patients the insulin Fiasp is $31.60 on the PBS, but Americans pay $930, while the medication Jardiance is $619 to $698 in the US compared to again $31.60 for the 220,000 Australians who access it. (I’m on Jardiance)
I genuinely think that in some third world countries, as part of the middle class, you can have a better life than in the USA.
If he wanted it to be freely available, why did he even sell the patent ? Just disclaim at the patent office. Selling is just asking the new holder to start enforcing.
They sold the patent to the University of Toronto, so they didn’t exactly sell it to a for-profit patent troll.
But also, that was in 1923, so the patent has long since expired.
I mean, that’s better than selling to a private person, still feels weird, since disclaiming a patent is absolutely possible, and has a 100% chance of leading to the desired outcome, vs whatever small chance there may be that the University starts taking profits on it. Or even just sees themselves forced to sell the patent, because of potential financial issues.
Yeah, the risk is small, but eliminating it in it’s entirety would’ve been easily possible, so it just feels a bit weird he didn’t do it.
Remember, the 1920s is long ago. Giving the patent to the equivalent of a non-profit organisation was probably better than disclaiming it, since it’s easier to have one large, well-known entity that will fight off people trying to re-patent it than to disclaim it and hope that no patent clerk ever lets a fraudulent re-patent go through.
In 1920 you couldn’t just google for prior art when fighting a fraudulent patent.
Ok, that is a fair point I hadn’t previosuly considered. Though disclaiming a patent doesn’t loose you all legal recourse.
If someone else tries to repatent it, even if it gets approved, you can still file a challenge against the new patent with the PTO. You (or anyone else, really) would also have a virtually guaranteed court win, even if someone got the patent through and tried to enforce it. All you’d have to prove in court is that prior art of the invention exists, therefore the patent is invalid and unenforceable, granted or not, so it’s unlikely someone would even bother trying to enforce such a patent. A previous, diclaimed patent, of literally the identical technology being on record is pretty iron clad and unavoidable evidence that the patent isn’t original.
Nowadays you just google for other patents and done. But back then, I guess that searching for prior art was quite a lot more difficult. Gifting the patent to an university so that they defend open access to the patent sounds like a more reliable plan.
I mean, even nowadays patents are greenlit my patent offices even though there’s clear prior art (Nintendo’s recent patent for catching monsters in a ball in a game comes to mind, which Nintendo would have to have patented before publishing their first game with that mechanic around 30 years ago), and even today it’s really difficult and expensive to get such a clear nonsense patent invalidated.
So difficult that e.g. Palworld opted to change the mechanic instead of fighting the patent.
So I do understand why someone would instead gift the patent to an university under the condition that they keep access to it open, especially 100 years ago.
That logic applies identically to a valid patent. For the issues you mention, there is no distinction between the patent being filed at the PTO and still valid, or being filled at the PTO and disclaimed. In terms of the enforcibility, and patentability of a ““new”” inventions with prior art, there is no legal distinction whatsoever between the prior art being a disclaimed or a valid patent, so I don’t think that’s a valid reason to not disclaim it.
Anyone who wants to repatent the process and harass people using it, would have an equally hard/easy time doing so, if the patent is disclaimed or valid.
The only real legal distinction between a disclaimed and valid patent is that the orignal patent holder can’t enforce the disclaimed one. And since that was the intended goal here, disclaimment feels like the obvious best choice.
That logic applies identically to a valid patent.
The difference is that in the case of transferring the patent to the university, there’s a legal department at the ready to defend the patent. The same is not the case for a disclaimed patent.
do people just not have credit cards?
This is the most evil comment I’ve seen in a very long time. The thought of someone burdening themselves with high interest debt. Debt that they don’t have the money to pay back. because if they don’t, they’ll die. That’s sickening.
Unless of course you think it’s a serious solution. Then it’s just plain ignorant. Clinical idiocy levels of stupid.
I would 1000% sooner take out high interest debt than die. What kind of question is this?
If somebody needs to pay for their insulin with a credit card, chances are they’re already not very well off.
So, start with a baseline mediocre life due to financial constraints. Oh wait, you’re also diabetic. So let’s drop that quality of life further. Now you’re $800 in debt, plus interest. Chances are you’re not paying the balance off next month, and if you’re not paying off the balance then you’re probably using credit to pay for your next batch. Now you’re in a cycle of paying off your debt, similar to payday loans. Your “disposable” income is now shrinking each month. You sacrifice meals, and you don’t do anything enjoyable because most things cost money, but you need your medicine to live. Eventually you end up so deep in the hole that you either have to sell what you have (i.e your home, if you even own one), or claim bankruptcy - which as a low income earner will limit your potential to pick yourself up even further. But wait! You still need to buy your insulin, and now nobody will lend to you. Now you’ve lost the value you’ve built throughout your life AND the debt keeps piling up.
Death sure sounds like an enticing option now. What’s the point of living if it’s in misery? You very well may rather be homeless for the rest of your life (while still being diabetic but not being able to afford your medicine), but I’d rather die.
