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Comment by methodover | Hacker News Reader

This story is absolutely heartbreaking. This young man died alone, trying to ration his $1300/mo insulin.

Does anyone know if there are startups trying to tackle this specific problem? I would be curious about learning more about them. I don't understand why a company doesn't just come in and massively undercut the competition.

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Patents. There is generic insulin available (Walmart sells it for $25/vial) but it's not the fancy stuff. It works much slower than the insulin most people take but not slow enough to replace long-lasting insulin.

This is the problem with most pharmaceuticals.

I believe we should cut patent duration to somewhere in the 5 year range. A patent should only be in force long enough to recoup R&D investment, and I think our current patent system is way beyond that.

Instead of healthcare reform, we should be pushing for patent reform. Reduced pharmaceutical prices would make healthcare reform much less expensive, and thus easier to sell.

Specifically with insulin the problem is evergreening. The big companies make small, incremental improvements to the brand-name drug which allows them to extend their patent. This makes sense when the improvements are significant, but there needs to be some lower-bound to how different the drugs can be before a patent is extended.

I don't think it's a startup problem, but more like a government problem

Indeed. The world needs less founders and more civic minded political candidates.

No startup is going to fix a nation’s dysfunctional healthcare system.

Why not? There's research into cutting costs in producing insulin as well as fixing diabetes. The government will "solve" the problem by socializing the cost of treatment, whereas a startup may seem a cure or a cheaper treatment.

Innovation is definitely higher risk, higher reward. I guess you need to decide whether you want better treatment access now or a potential cure later (with the caveat that more could suffer now). I know I prefer to support seeking cures over funding treatments even if that means more people will suffer now. Thus, I think we need more founders, not more policy.

Also, it seems that many forms of diabetes can be reversed by fixing diet. If a founder can help people fix their diet, demand would drop, which should drop prices due to oversupply and make funding treatments cheaper (e.g. for type 1 diabetes where no cure is likely, aside from potential improvements in transplants).

It's also not as rare as it should be. In my area recently, a man died because he couldn't afford the oxygen supply he required.

That's just so sad. These medicines should be more available for people. We're living in yr 2019; shouldn't be this way!

This only happens in America. We don’t care if you die from lack of medical care or from gun violence. People absolutely just don’t care unless they are told to. A few months ago a huge chunk of our country was more worried about a caravan of immigrants than the other more likely threats. Our priorities are just screwed up. This is all to keep the public distracted and not focused on fixing real problems.

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