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.