A new JAMA paper that says insulin prices have nearly tripled in a decade is making the internet rounds – and for good reason. Insulin was discovered nearly a century ago. What’s driving the price so high?
A 2015 infographic from the Alliance of Community Health Plans gives us a clue as to why we’re faced with these skyrocketing numbers. After all, as JAMA points out, insulin dosage levels have increased between 2002 and 2013 – and the cost has risen from $4.34 per milliliter to $12.92 per milliliter.
Stunningly, JAMA says the costs U.S. diabetics spend on insulin and other blood sugar-controlling medications is higher than the amount Americans spend on all other drugs, combined.
The primary reason is that drugmakers are rolling out reformulated and enhanced versions of insulin, called insulin analogs. These, in turn, allow the pharma giants to incrementally raise the costs – particularly as they price-match to keep in line with competitors.
“The large increase in costs can largely be explained (by) much greater use of newer types of insulin known as analog insulins,” said University of Melbourne’s Philip Clarke, a senior author of the JAMA paper, in an interview with Reuters. “While these drugs can be better for some patients, they are much more costly than the human insulin they replaced.”
What’s still in question, however, is whether the broader clinical efficacy is commensurate to the price hikes over the past several years.
A Deep-dive Into Specialty Pharma
A specialty drug is a class of prescription medications used to treat complex, chronic or rare medical conditions. Although this classification was originally intended to define the treatment of rare, also termed “orphan” diseases, affecting fewer than 200,000 people in the US, more recently, specialty drugs have emerged as the cornerstone of treatment for chronic and complex diseases such as cancer, autoimmune conditions, diabetes, hepatitis C, and HIV/AIDS.
Here are some noteworthy facts from CAHP that fall in line with the JAMA findings:
- Costs rose 150 percent for six popular, brand-name diabetes drugs in the past five years. Two of these drugs rose in price more than 250 percent.
- In 2012, the cost of treating diabetes was $245 billion
- The spend on insulin and other diabetes medications is projected to rise 18.3 percent over the next three years – a rate that’s 60 times greater than the income growth rate of 0.3 percent across all households.
Specifically, the skyrocketing drugs are Januvia, Humalog, Novolin, Levemir, Lantus, SymlinPen 60 and Humulin. No generic options are available for these insulin analogs, which adds to the greater diabetes spend.
