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Comment by chadash | Hacker News Reader

> 4 In 5 Americans Who Need Insulin Have Taken On Credit Card Debt To Cover The Drug's Cost

This smelled fishy to me so I looked a little further into the numbers. The page linking to the study says that it involved 1,000 insured participants and 1,000 uninsured. So right off the bat, unless exactly 50% of the population is insured/uninsured, you can't really extrapolate exact numbers from this survey, unless they gave you results broken down by insurance status.

According to https://www.cdc.gov/diabetes/data/statistics-report/diagnose..., about 46% of diagnosed diabetes cases are in people >65, meaning covered by medicare. I'd assume that at least a good chunk of people <65 have insurance, meaning this survey is completely unrepresentative from the start.

Don't take any of this to mean that I don't think the price of insulin is too high. It certainly is. But this survey is misleading at best.

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Just looking at statistics of who has any kind of diabetes isn't valid either. T2 diabetics are vastly less likely to use injectable insulin, where as 100% of type 1 diabetics must use insulin. Type 1 diabetics are commonly young, hence it being known as juvenile diabetes.

T2 diabetes gets more common in the overweight and those unable to exercise because of mobility issues increasing their levels of insulin resistance, hence the rise you see in the elderly.

So if 100% of uninsured people have taken out credit card debt for insulin, merely 60% of insured people have! That doesn’t sound much better.

Yea the op is bringing up a bunch of details to obscure the findings. Its still really bad no matter how you slice it, and trying to slice it a bunch of different ways to make it look less bad is just disingenuous

I don't believe this is true. I'm merely calling out the lack of detail on methodology of this "study". They are already pretty explicit that this isn't a true random sample, but I'd like more info on how. For all I know, this study was done on CharityRx's own website, which presumably caters to people who are less likely to be able to afford insulin in the first place.

I'm not in any way saying insulin prices aren't an issue, but at the same time, I don't think misleading headlines are helpful either.

Sure, but I'm skeptical of all the claims made here given the lack of clarity in the example I point out above. This is not a peer-reviewed study, it's a "survey" performed by a company with very little information given about methods.

About 10% of US residents are uninsured.

https://www.aha.org/news/headline/2021-11-17-cdc-reports-uni...

Regular Medicare doesn't cover insulin. Beneficiaries would have to enroll in a drug plan.

https://www.medicare.gov/coverage/insulin

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