Have you ever been in a situation where you used up your 90 day supply of insulin well before the 90 days are up? It happens to me quite frequently. In fact, it happens, every single time. I’m usually always down to my last insulin pen or vial when I am re-ordering and it’s a day or two before I am allowed to re-order according to the insurance company.
Why does this happen a lot?
I am definitely not going to say that I know enough about clinical trials and what phase 1 or late-stage studies means, but when I see a report, I’m going to report it. This news is a couple of weeks old. Hey, I didn’t say it was breaking news, I just said it was news.
So this article is in regards to Eli Lilly’s Ultra Rapid Lispro insulin which is basically like Humalog, but faster. If I’m not mistaken, it is Eli Lilly’s version of Fiasp, but like I said, I could be wrong.
The good news is that the late-stage studies showed that this insulin “significantly improved post meal blood sugar levels”. That’s the kind of stuff that I like to hear.
I like hearing about new, better insulins.
Obviously, most of that doesn’t matter because majority of us are not going to be able to afford the new insulins, but that’s an ongoing issue (which I’ve been attacked on before from people who don’t know me, so I’m not talking about that in this post.)
I’ve tried Fiasp in the past and I absolutely loved it. Unfortunately, my insurance didn’t cover it, so I couldn’t keep using it. My insurances over the years have switched quite often which means that I’ve switched between Humalog and Novolog.
I haven’t really seen too much of a difference between these two, so I’m hoping that a competitor to Fiasp comes to market and then at least one of the two will be covered by my insurance.
I am a little late to posting my thoughts from the Novo Nordisk Social Media Summit that took place earlier this month. I must first start off by saying that Novo Nordisk paid for my roundtrip airfare, hotel, meals and provided full access to the Indy Grand Prix at the Indianapolis Motor Speedway.
I arrived on Thursday evening, but the summit didn’t begin until Friday morning.
On Friday morning, we started out with introductions of everyone in the room and a quick overview of what we were there to discuss.
Insulin pricing was obviously going to be one of the primary topics of discussion. As expected, there were a lot of questions and a lot of confusion as to why it is not just a simple task of lowering the costs of insulin. Why are people dying? Why can’t people afford a life saving medication?
During this conversation there were some slides and information that was shared with us. One of those was a link to Novo Nordisk Position on Pricing and Affordability, which I honestly have never seen. You can find that here – http://www.novonordisk-us.com/whoweare/about-novo-nordisk/our-position-on-pricing-and-affordability.html
One of the questions brought up was why the list price of Novolog has continued to go up year after year after year. One thing that I found interesting was a graph that was shown comparing the increase in the list price compared to the net price, meaning what the price actually is after all the costs and payments and rebates, etc are taken out. These lines have actually stayed relatively flat!
That was very insightful to me. That because of increase in outside costs (PBMs for one), the list price had to be increased in order to keep the net price out of a negative.
I think that this is one of the areas that people don’t understand. They don’t understand the entire system. Most people think of insulin as a direct to consumer product and it’s not. It’s not an iPhone that Apple can just lower the price of and then the consumer sees that direct decrease in pricing.
That leads me to the next image of the complexity of this system. Just take a look at this convoluted system and tell me how “just lower the list price” works here.
Now, I want to state here again, because I’ve been accused of not caring about insulin pricing, that I want the price of insulin to be lower. I just know that it’s not as simple to lower the list price and then everything will be fine. There will be loss of access to insulins because they will be removed from formularies. Not all insulins will be removed, but access will be lost for a lot of people, so we have to find the fine line between access and affordability.
This is a systemic issue and a healthcare related issue that needs more of a solution than just lower the list price. And I really wish that the protestors that are out there could just simply learn how to have a conversation and not just shout at people who may say something they don’t agree with.
I will get more into the insulin pricing in another post, but I wanted to touch base on more about the summit.
Final thoughts on insulin pricing for this post is this. Know the battle you are fighting, the whole battle, not just what you think is going on and come to the table with a solution, not just a cute phrase to shout at a picket line.
Other discussions that we had at the summit between Friday and Saturday discussed Type 2 Diabetes and the Get Real About Diabetes campaign that Novo Nordisk started. You may have seen something about it on the ABC show Black-ish.
We then also talked about the Race with Insulin campaign and Charlie Kimball. If you are not familiar with Charlie Kimball by now, he is an Indy Car driver who has type 1 diabetes. We also attended the practice sessions and the Indy Grand Prix race on Saturday.
I left the race early and then headed to the airport to head back home just in time for Mother’s Day, which I am still making up for that because of being tired and exhausted all day on Mother’s Day.
In the diabetes community there is a lot of uproar over how you are supposed to advocate, what you are supposed to advocate for and who you are supposed to do it with. Now, I might be mistaken, but don’t I have the right to advocate my own way, about what I want to and with who I want to? I will always advocate my way, because it’s what works for me. I can’t advocate a way someone else wants me to or about someone else’s passion because then I don’t have any passion behind that advocating.
Advocating for something requires passion. Without passion, your advocacy efforts will die out very quickly.
Also, I strongly believe that in order to find a common ground or to get something from someone you must work with them. Attacking people, or companies, is not going to work. It just won’t.
You may not agree with me, and that is fine, it’s an opinion. Opinions aren’t facts, so they can both potentially be right.
So, if that requires me to work with an organization or company to find a solution, then guess what? I’m going to do that.
And guess what else? If you don’t like it, I don’t really care.
You advocate your way.
I will advocate my way.
They say that there’s two ways to have the biggest building in town.
1. You can just work hard and outwork everyone to build the biggest building in town.
2. You can knock down the current biggest building in town.
Now, I will choose option 1 every single time. I will never try to advance myself or my advocacy efforts by tearing down someone else’s efforts. And to add to that, I can’t stand people who choose option number 2. Put in the work, do more, and support others who are in the fight together (whether you think they are or not).
There are just a lot of negative people out there. Twitter has made it much easier for these people to be even more negative. Wake up complaining, complain all day, go to bed complaining, yet do nothing.
Those are the people who choose number 2 above.
Start working towards accomplishing number 1.
And that’s that.
Bottom line is this. We all have different passions. We may share the same end goal, but approach it differently.
There are people who advocate for the same end goal as me, and I may not agree with how they go about it, but I will still support it, because I know that there are some aspects of their advocacy that are actually helping push the ball forward. I also feel that there are things done that roll the ball back 10 feet for every 1 foot they gain, but that’s how they decide to do it.
Instead of spending time (wasting time) arguing with others how they are advocating, use that same time to push your advocacy effortsforward.
Insert something about bees and honey and vinegar here. I would never want to attract bees, so it makes no sense to me, but you know what I’m saying.
The information below was a press release sent out by the American Association of Clinical Endocrinologists (AACE) and the Endocrine Society. I don’t typically share press releases, but insulin affordability is a big concern and all the information about it must be shared everywhere!
AACE and Endocrine Society Partner to Address Insulin Affordability and Access
The American Association of Clinical Endocrinologists (AACE) and the Endocrine Society have teamed up to address the high cost of insulin and the associated burdens placed on the millions of Americans who rely on costly daily insulin injections.
Together AACE and the Endocrine Society introduced a resolution this week at the 2017 Interim Meeting of the AMA House of Delegates that called on the AMA to pursue several initiatives aimed at improving insulin affordability for patients with diabetes. The resolution called on the AMA to convene a summit to identify potential solutions to the dramatic increase in insulin costs and also advocate for initiatives to reduce patient cost-sharing for insulins, stabilize drug formularies throughout a plan year to reduce non-medical switching of insulin products; facilitate greater transparency of insulin pricing and integrate drug formularies into electronic health records.
Overwhelming support for addressing insulin costs and their impact on patients expressed on the floor of the House of Delegates led to a unanimous vote for the AMA to study these issues and provide a report with findings and recommendations to the House of Delegates at the 2018 Annual Meeting in June.
“We are concerned rising insulin prices have created a barrier hindering people with diabetes who are insulin-dependent from obtaining the treatments they need,” said the Endocrine Society’s President-Elect Susan J. Mandel, MD, MPH. “The approved initiatives will engage stakeholders to work together to improve access to lifesaving therapies.”
“This is an important and encouraging step toward addressing the issues affecting insulin costs and the challenges that our patients face in accessing this medication,” said AACE President Jonathan D. Leffert. “AACE is pleased to partner with our friends at the Endocrine Society to help address this issue that is so critical to all of our patients.”
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About the Endocrine Society
Endocrinologists are at the core of solving the most pressing health problems of our time, from diabetes and obesity to infertility, bone health, and hormone-related cancers. The Endocrine Society is the world’s oldest and largest organization of scientists devoted to hormone research and physicians who care for people with hormone-related conditions.
The Society has more than 18,000 members, including scientists, physicians, educators, nurses and students in 122 countries. To learn more about the Society and the field of endocrinology, visit our site at www.endocrine.org. Follow us on Twitter at @TheEndoSociety and @EndoMedia.
About the American Association of Clinical Endocrinologists (AACE)
The American Association of Clinical Endocrinologists (AACE) represents more than 7,000 endocrinologists in the United States and abroad. AACE is the largest association of clinical endocrinologists in the world. The majority of AACE members are certified in Diabetes, Endocrinology and Metabolism and concentrate on the treatment of patients with endocrine and metabolic disorders including diabetes, thyroid disorders, osteoporosis, growth hormone deficiency, cholesterol disorders, hypertension and obesity. Visit our site at www.aace.com, or follow us on social media: https://www.facebook.com/TheAACE/, https://twitter.com/TheAACE.