«In 1923 the inventor of insulin sold his patent for a dollar: he didn’t want to become a billionaire, he wanted to save lives. Today, one hundred years later, an overflowing wave of corporate greed has produced an unacceptable multiplication of insulin prices, which have risen a thousand percent since 1996. A system that forces millions of diabetic patients to ration their own is intolerable. doses of medicine while the three US insulin producers make 21 billion dollars in profits».
Word of Bernie Sanders: after having twice tried to win the Democratic nomination for the White House, at 81 the independent senator, who defines himself as a Social Democrat, writes what could be the final page of his political history as chairman of the Health Commission , Labor and Pensions of the Senate. “Medicare for all”, his recipe for reforming the health system by offering all citizens the protection of Medicare, public health for the elderly, for years has garnered vast acclaim in the polls, and not only on the left, but it has never become law.
Sanders is now proposing his reform but only for consistency: he knows very well that it will not pass since he does not even have the support of all the democratic senators. And the other measures he has in mind, concentrated above all on the pharmaceutical industry, will also struggle to take off, given that almost everyone would need a qualified majority – the vote of 60 out of 100 senators – to pass. But Sanders is still convinced that he can make a difference with his fiery oratory and the recognized ability to denounce, data in hand, the excesses of the most brutal capitalism to the detriment of the most fragile subjects: poor people unable to buy life-saving medicines sold to hundreds of dollars even if their production cost does not go to ten.
His hope is to force enterprises of big pharma to change course if not for legal obligations, because you are ashamed before all of America. In the case of insulin something is happening: his proposal to impose a ceiling of 20 dollars on the price of a bottle, is finding the increasingly convinced support of many Democratic parliamentarians and even some Republicans. In all likelihood it won’t become law, but therehe campaign launched by Sanders and the prospect of being called to testify before Congress led at least one of the three US manufacturers, Eli Lilly, to announce a 70% cut in the price of his drug, the Humalog. It’s not the $20 drop Sanders wanted, but it’s still a big step forward. The other manufacturers, Sanofi and Novo Nordisk, however, will continue to sell Lantus and Novolog, their insulins, at prices just under $300: a year of treatment for the average US patient costs $17,000.
Waiting to drag the protagonists of this business to the stand in the Senate, Sanders will flex his muscles next Tuesday with Moderna CEO Stephane Bancel who, under threat of a judicial subpoena, agreed to testify before the Senate. The manager, who is now credited with a personal fortune of $5 billion, will have to explain because it quadrupled the price of its coronavirus vaccinedespite research and development being funded by the federal government with US taxpayer money.