 Welcome back to Rational Politics. This is part two of our talk on the pharmaceutical industries here in America and how you're all getting screwed over so badly. But we're going to dedicate this portion of the show to insulin. I'd like to welcome back to the table Ike and Isaiah. Isaiah has an interesting story to tell because Isaiah unfortunately does suffer from diabetes and he discovered this when he was nine years old. Isaiah, why don't you very briefly tell us a story and who was to blame for you discovering that you have diabetes? It was a long story. I went over to a wrestling tournament for my cousin in Chicago, sadly and in that time I had a drink that was a little too sugary and my pancreas decided I don't really feel like working anymore and so on my way home from that trip I started to have all the symptoms of high blood sugar, the vomiting, the almost comatose sleep and the craving of water. As that happened we got home and my family just believed it was a stomach bug because when you vomit a bunch, that's the first instinct. Nobody's going to go to diabetes right away. My grandma gave me ginger ale because that's the cure-all to stomach bugs. Turns out ginger ale also has a ton of sugar which just so happened to spike me just a bit more and so I went another couple of weeks and then my dad brought me into the hospital and they found out I had a blood sugar of approximately 766 which a normal typically functioning human has around 120. So they got me on insulin and I'm diagnosed type 1 diabetics from when I was nine. So the prices of insulin has always hit sort of close to home. I have really good insurance through my parents but it's still something that I have to look down the pike and when I turn 26 I'm not going to have that insurance anymore and I have to figure out how I'm going to pay for what is essentially my life-saving drug. Absolutely. I tell you what, let's first have a little bit of history on where did insulin come from because it's a very interesting history. Not many people know this but insulin is actually 100 years old this year and they discovered how to actually invent, I'm going to use that word, insulin. Up in Canada, Frederick Banting came up with a way to extract the pancreatic extract. Now the pancreas in the human body is the one organ that helps keep sugar levels correct. John McLeod who was the head of physiology at the University of Toronto oversaw this process. Charles Best, Banting's assistant, helped refine the process and finally a biochemist named James Colip helped to purify the insulin to make it human ready. And this was all done in 1921 so we can all think back to the mad professors labs at Bunsenburners and all the rest of it. They did not have all the modern equipment that they had today. Frederick Banting, who actually made the major discovery, didn't want a patent and I don't know whether this would have changed anything or not but he just refused to put his name on it and this was 1923 after they had resolved all of the issues of making it human ready. His co-inventors, James Colip and Charles Best, they actually did patent insulin. However, they sold it the patent to Toronto University for one dollar because what they firmly and honestly believe was this was so important, life-saving, life-changing medicine, it should just be there for humanity to use. Yeah and to touch on that, they really wanted it to be free but now we have in today's society over 30 million Americans rely on insulin just to survive. You have people from all different classes trying to pay for this insulin that is all the same price. So you have people in the top 1% having to pay penny change for insurance but then you also have on the opposite side the people in impoverished areas and sadly it's people of my community, the Mexican community that are in these impoverished areas that are paying those extremely high copays and also if they can't afford insurance they're paying over the counter-cost which is just for generic is about $100 per vial which lasts about three days. So that kind of ties into what you're taking some stances on with single payer and if you want to talk on that just a little. Yeah and I think what you touched on Isaiah is the real effect of profit driven policy it's the human tragedy that's occurring right here in the richest nation on earth where we have this life-saving medication like you mentioned that the inventors wanted people to have access to treat their ailments and instead of making money for people it would help human beings that are affected with diabetes survive, literally live and now here in the richest nation on earth less well to do communities rationing their insulin this is tragic because they can lose limbs they're compromising their health and well-being so that some pharmacy benefit management organization or pharmaceutical company or corporation or CEO can fly around in a private jet or have an extra million dollars in their already flush bank account they don't need that what needs to be in place is exactly what the inventors of this medication intended to and that's that it be available to everyone that needs it and that's why they put that dollar patent on it so that no one else would be able to take the proprietary blend the actual chemical composition or the production process from that insulin and then profit off it actually they would then be able to patent it themselves if there's no patent and what they were trying to prevent is the detriment to society that we're experiencing right now yeah I mean I read somewhere upwards of a million people in America cannot afford their insulin and you mentioned that there's people out there that are rationing insulin and it's detrimental to their health we actually have the stat here that it's about according to the American Diabetes Association 650,000 people every day are rationing insulin because of the cost that turns into these costs in hospitals when they're losing limbs their eyesight goes, they have to deal with glasses now that just keeps piling up on them and it's insanely sad how so many people are struggling to pay for a drug that the inventors themselves didn't want to be paid for right and it's morally abhorrent it's just like should somebody be profiting off of someone who is experiencing a life-threatening situation I don't think that you should profit off of people in their most vulnerable position in life the thing that people don't seem to understand about the National Health Service in the UK is the way that it's actually structured in the UK there is a panel and they negotiate with the drug companies, the pharmaceuticals on what they are willing to buy the drug for and they negotiate and they negotiate and if the pharmaceutical company thinks the prices may be a little bit too low obviously there'd be a negotiation but the UK market's a huge market that's right, in England if you get a prescription from a doctor it's going to cost you £9, 15 shillings no matter the drug it doesn't matter whether it's penicillin or the most expensive chemotherapy drug on the market which comes out to about $12 basically in the UK people spend, this is the entire population of the UK they actually give the government approximately £1,500 per year which is about $1,800 and that covers, over the course of a year that covers the funding of the National Health Service just that yet they keep telling us over here oh it's going to cost billions of dollars oh it's going to cost billions of dollars no it's not not if it's done properly right, and the reason it's going to cost billions of dollars which it really wouldn't is because we do not allow the negotiation that you mentioned that happens in the UK to take place Medicare and Medicaid are not allowed to negotiate with the pharmaceuticals or the pharmacy benefit management organizations on the cost of the insulin for instance you wind up paying eight times the costs that you would pay in Canada for $300 for a vial instead of 20 and that's the effect of profit driven health care system I'd like to know Isaiah through your experience I'm sure in the community you've met folks who have experienced having to ration their insolence yeah I have a couple people I know I won't name them by name but they're some friends of mine they come from some poorer communities and they're unable to afford insurance in general if they're unable to afford the insurance they're completely unable to afford insulin and there's been a few times where we've had to, me and my family have had to donate pens and needles and things that outside just the basic insulin cost are still required to just deliver the insulin a vial of insulin isn't going to deliver itself at all you can't just, it's not something you can drink but yeah, I've had friends and family that I've had to personally give out and help them with these things that they can't afford and I've been fortunate enough to be blessed with better insurance and coming from a little bit better of a situation and it's sad and I also have family members who even though they were in the upper middle class, middle class people they were still unable to afford insulin but they were so bad at taking care of them so bad at taking care of themselves that they've lost legs and those are people that are able to do their insulin every day without having to pinch their pennies so that's just coming off of middle America people imagine the detriment that happens to the lower Americans who are now, like we've said, rationing their insulin they're going to, it's going to come out in the end and it's going to be a humanitarian issue as you've mentioned and the big problem of course here is the fact that there are no true generic versions of insulin available there's some that come close but they're not as good as the ones but a generic is meant to be as good as the parent that it's following basically put it that way and you say why are there no generics, that's wrong well pharmaceuticals have found a great workaround tweak a molecule here tweak a molecule there and that's repattant it and I think that with respect to Congressional District 4 for a second and the minority community the Mexican American minority community that Isaiah mentioned and can you imagine living in a trailer park in Greeley and being nine years old and having no health insurance and having your parents have no health insurance and them working maybe a meatpacking plant you know barely making a minimum wage barely able to afford food then to be faced with a medical situation like the one that Isaiah has been faced with with no insurance and that's a situation that a lot of people in Congressional District 4 are in right now and you know my opponent Ken Buck voted to repeal the ACA and take away health care from 52,000 CD4 residents many of them afflicted with diabetes for instance and place them in a situation where they have to ration their insulin we should talk a little bit about the injectors and the cost of the injectors because these pharmacy benefit management organizations and these corporations are fixing the prices of not just the drug but what it takes to deliver the drug whatever happens to the good old syringe in a needle I actually happen to have a bunch of those as backups in case the medical miracle of that I call my insulin pump decides to fail those about a pack of 50 I think costs $10 which isn't super expensive but you think how cheap it is to make it it's a tube of plastic with a needle on it it's probably four cents if anything it's pocket change and they're selling it for probably an exponential increase in that type of thing you mentioned your opponent Ken Buck and the people in this district about six in ten adults in America have a chronic condition so this goes outside the scope of Democrat vs Republican this is a humanitarian issue that needs to be addressed by both sides of the aisle it can't just be Democrats asking for single-payer healthcare it needs to be something that both sides are able to come together on and I think that's something that you can do brilliantly but also it's very important to all Americans this isn't just it's not only Democrats that have diabetes or Republicans that have cancer it's America's problem not a party problem it's a human problem and that's a lot of the problems that we're faced with and a lot of my policy is based soundly and fundamentally foundationally on human rights and really here in the United States we were formed on human rights and independence and freedom and liberty and how can you live a life the cost of what you need to be healthy is so exorbitant and that it actually forces 60% of the bankruptcies annually in America to occur we need to talk about how we fix the situation as well as the problems that are in the system and that's what Isaiah started to talk about for a second and that's how we stand up a public option in our healthcare system it's how we bring transparency it's how we bring federal disclosure standards and transparency standards to the industry and that's how we start pushing down the costs of prescription medications and healthcare is with sound federal regulation and oversight let's re-emphasize here as well that the pharmaceuticals spend three times more on advertising than they do on R&D we talked about in the first show it's worth mentioning again because I'm going to look straight into the camera guess how much it costs the pharmaceuticals to make one vial of insulin and guess how much they actually charge for it Isaiah, why don't you take that one on? Yeah, in my research and in my experience it costs about four dollars to make insulin a vial of insulin costs about four dollars That per vial it depends on how much insulin you're using every insulin dependent person is different exactly, but it's four dollars per vial which for me personally is about nine days worth of insulin so you think about that and then what the drug companies charge over the counter is about three hundred dollars I thought this country had laws about profiteering because I remember when I first moved over here in the oil embargo gas stations in Boston where I used to live were actually being sued for profiteering because of the gas shortages if that costs me four dollars to make I want three hundred dollars for it and if you don't buy it you're going to die These are scum bags I'm not going to mince my words on this these are absolute scum bags that are doing this and of course it's all being again driven because of profit Go on Isaiah, you jump in here Yeah, and something that I actually mentioned last time it's the reason that they're able to do it even though it is frowned upon and illegal and something that shouldn't be happening is because of how much government officials are funded by these special interest groups you mentioned that last time I don't want to go back into that, you can but it's just astounding how much that congressional people are making based on these packs and super packs they're just kind of pushing it under the rug and ignoring it They're no better than the drug companies in fact they're worse than the drug companies because they're in a position where they could actually do something to help the people that voted for them Maybe the interests of the people include access to healthcare that doesn't bankrupt them that keeps them alive and that gives them the freedom to live with liberty and independence and a for-profit driven medical system compromises that In the richest nation on earth I think that we can probably figure out a better way of doing it We just need to look outward and then look back inward and identify the problems which is profiteering in the system it's these claw backs it's processes of being able to fix prices and only allow access to certain brand name medications We can curtail at the federal level with regulation and disclosure mandates to start pushing the system back towards a patient care centric operational where it should be We touched on it a little bit about the R&D spendings They're spending most of their money on the delivery mechanism When these corporations make their insulin available only in these certain delivery systems and you have research and development dollars being spent with the intent of increasing profits instead of research and development being spent on medications with better efficacy or on research and development on pancreatic treatment processes In early stage cases there's a lot of different ways that we could allocate R&D funding and there's billions of dollars in profit every year that should be allocated to research and development of more applicable medications instead of drive up the profits of existing systems If the pharmaceutical companies did what they should do which is stop spending all this damn money on advertising three times more in marketing I can remember when marketing would be a group of two or three people and development R&D would be hundreds of people I've got a question for Isaiah Can you only get your insulin via one of these pens or can you also still buy it as a vial? There's a couple different ways Vial is how I get my insulin it's because I have an insulin pump which is another price hike in and of itself but the vials is what I use there's also yes there's insulin pens that come in they look like little pens that you can do shots with there's a couple different ways but they're all controlled once again by the same people who are controlling everything I think that we have to talk about the patient because sometimes pumps and things keep a more stable level of insulin in the body some of the research and development on things like pumps and pins is good and there should be an equitable amount spent on development of new drugs and therapies not just being spent on delivery systems that can you know force patients into a higher cost avenue of treatment the best avenue of treatment for each individual patient that individual patient shouldn't be forced into the highest cost avenue and that's essentially the effect of the policy that these pharmacy benefit managers are having sometimes different delivery systems are better but price gouging those delivery systems is the problem I think that we need to talk about how we force down the costs of these delivery systems, pumps, pens, etc one of the ways of doing that is to have, of course, a public option with a federal government and that's what I think we need to work towards accomplishing in the long term what I think would be a bigger message draft legislation that means something that isn't just funded by these PBM packs I really hope that Ike does get elected next time I really hope that because I'd love him to be in Washington because that means a field trip to interview you but it would be Ike versus the rest and that to me is so disheartening it's not even funny I want to thank you so much for coming into the CIT Network today it's been absolutely wonderful talking to you I'm still really upset about all of this research that we did because it really shows that there's a gaping hole in healthcare in this country yeah, I just want to say thanks so much for having me here again on this amazing show it's been a pleasure to meet you Isaiah and thanks for having me again on Rational Politics, Nigel Isaiah, thank you so much how do you feel after doing your first series of shows? I'm excited to keep doing more excellent, that's what I like to hear thank you very much for coming in today okay guys, I'm going to talk to you directly there is something you can do about this and it's called writing a letter not an email, don't do emails that doesn't work, a real letter flood your congressman flood your senators with the fact that they personally are killing you because you're not getting the treatment that you need start becoming vocal out there start demanding what this country desperately needs and that's a real health system not this total I'm going to say the word, I'll let Tom beeping out this total fucking mess that is happening in this country over health care it has got to get sorted out people are suffering for no reason and that is wrong thank you very much for watching this Rational Politics it's good to see you all again and we will be back in the near future I'm your host Nigel Aves, signing off