A hard-fought campaign to reduce the exorbitant price of insulin seems to finally be yielding some results. On Wednesday, drugmaker Eli Lilly announced it would slash the price of the lifesaving drug by over 70 percent and cap out-of-pocket costs at $35 a month for most patients. Non-branded insulin will fall to just $25 a bottle from its current price of $82.41—a major win for the 7.5 million Americans who rely on insulin but still orders of magnitude above the drug’s single-digit price tag in many high-income countries.The cuts expand on a clause of the Inflation Reduction Act passed by Democrats in August, which capped the price of insulin at $35 for Medicare recipients since Jan. 1. Though insulin is cheap to manufacture, its retail price has skyrocketed in the U.S. in recent years, climbing over 54 percent between 2014 and 2019. With the number of Americans suffering from diabetes doubling in the last 20 years, the sky-high price of insulin has become a symbol of America’s extraordinarily high healthcare costs.
