this post was submitted on 26 Nov 2025
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Soo why sell the patent for $1 and have it be potentially exploited when you could hold onto it and licence use for free?
IIRC the insulin being sold now is manufactured differently and the patents are completely different anyway
But overall your point is good
It is different, but it's still incredibly cheap to make, $4 a vial, so it costing in the hundreds is just antihuman...
It's not anti human, the rest of us get it just fine. It's specifically anti-american
This is a great way of phrasing things.
Services that are necessary for life (like healthcare)...if other countries have figured out how to make it affordable/free (at point of use), any person or industry that tries to extract profit out of it is literally anti-American.
Bingo. It's extortion and if the asshat in charge gave any kind of a real fuck about cheap medicine it should've been a day 1 fix.
Absolutely. I'm just saying that the original guy selling the patent isn't the reason that corporations can gouge Americans for insulin now.
The insulin produced now has benefited from advances in technology just like most things. The fast acting insulin is predictable and works in 45 minutes to an hour and a half. The original insulin took hours and wasn't nearly as predictable or stable. Testing/monitoring technology has seen even more significant advances.
I owe Banting and his colleagues my life, but it is different. That's not to say that the continued well being of the public should be profitable and exclusive.
I mean insulin is about 10x more expensive in the USA compared to other Western countries. It's cheaper still in lower income countries. Many European countries also have a price ceiling for medication, so your monthly cost for life-saving drugs is capped.
I don't know exactly why a manufacturer doesn't set up production for much cheaper generics in the USA, but for whatever reason Americans are getting price gouged like Satan doesn't believe in tomorrow.
It was sold to a Canadian public university to manage the patent for public good.
They have, everywhere else in the world basically, insulin costs pennies.
In America, they have been able to patent certain formulations and delivery methods, and they keep making marginal modifications to string the patents out to keep Americans locked in to absurd insulin prices.
Was that the answer you thought it was going to be?