Profits Over Lives1
Insulin Price Gouging Profits Over Saving Lives
Eduardo Dacosta Lopez REL4063 U01 Prof. Jeanette Smith 4/27/2019
Profits Over Lives2
Introduction
Before the discovery of insulin, children diagnosed with the disease wouldn't survive over a year. Those that did would suffer from health issues such as blindness, limb loss and kidney failure. About 7.5 million Americans depend on insulin to manage their blood sugar levels on a daily basis. By using insulin, they are able to prevent the debilitating or deadly health complications caused by diabetes. This lifesaving drug, however, has become increasingly unaffordable, putting a massive financial burden on millions of patients and the healthcare system. Before we can discuss the issue of price gouging and how it affects patients, an understanding of what diabetes is, how people can acquire the disease and the environmental conditions that promote the disease is necessary to grasp the scope of the bigger picture.
Patients with diabetes suffer from this disease because their blood glucose or blood sugar is abnormally high. This is important because glucose is the main form of human energy obtained from food. In order to convert glucose from ingested food into usable energy, the pancreas uses a hormone called insulin. If a patient's body doesn't make enough insulin or doesn't use it effectively, then the glucose stays in the patient's blood stream and doesn't reach cells to be converted into energy. Having too much glucose in the blood stream can cause a number of health issues such as fatigue, blurred vision, increased thirst, and death (heart disease, stroke, kidney failure, limb loss). Among the different types of diabetes the most common are Type I (juvenile-onset) and Type II (adult-onset) diabetes.
Type I diabetes being the less common of the two, begins during childhood. Being characterized as an autoimmune condition, Type I patient's antibodies attack the pancreas causing it to stop the production of insulin. Other cases of Type I diabetes are known to be the result of faulty beta cells in the pancreas that would normally produce the insulin needed. Unfortunately, Type I patients are insulin dependent to the point where daily use of insulin is necessary in order to maintain quality of life. The most common type of diabetes is Type II. In these patients the pancreas does produce insulin, but is either not enough or the body's cells have already developed a resistance to the hormone. These patients are not insulin dependent but some may require it to compensate for declining insulin production, as diabetes is a progressive disease. About three decades ago, Type II diabetes was normally found only in adults; however, there has been an alarming increase in cases of Type II diabetes found in children in recent years.
The National Institutes of Health (NIH) and the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) funded the SEARCH for Diabetes in Youth study which reported that from 2002 -- 2012 the number of new cases of Type I in youth (11,244 individuals ages 0-