An open-source artificial pancreas

Posted Jan 31, 2019 12:17 UTC (Thu) by nilsmeyer (guest, #122604)
In reply to: An open-source artificial pancreas by marcH
Parent article: An open-source artificial pancreas

> There's also one specific, _developed_ country where insulin is available but only if you're well insured or very rich because its price was multiplied in a few years.

It's not like the insurers are making Insulin so you still end up paying more, it's just filtered through your insurer.

> This reason is simply the economic dogma that "competition and free markets" can solve absolutely any kind of economic problem even in the overwhelming evidence that competition doesn't always happen and in the face of prices 10 times cheaper across the border in "less free" Canada with its socialist hence dangerous healthcare system.

Healthcare is no free market and competition is very often excluded through patents.

An open-source artificial pancreas

Posted Jan 31, 2019 15:06 UTC (Thu) by marcH (subscriber, #57642) [Link] (2 responses)

> competition is very often excluded through patents.

Yes that's one of the problems in general. However in this case insulin is 90 years old and threre's a generic available... in "almost" every country.

An open-source artificial pancreas

Posted Jan 31, 2019 16:42 UTC (Thu) by jani (subscriber, #74547) [Link]

Couple of nitpicks. I believe nowadays almost everyone uses insulin analogs for which the patents started expiring only recently. They're roughly 20 years old, not 90. The alternatives (that just started coming out) are called biosimilars instead of generics because they're similar, not identical.

An open-source artificial pancreas

Posted Feb 1, 2019 6:28 UTC (Fri) by nilsmeyer (guest, #122604) [Link]

> Yes that's one of the problems in general. However in this case insulin is 90 years old and threre's a generic available... in "almost" every country.

But there are vastly improved forms of insulin (ultra short acting for example) that enjoyed patent protection for a long time. After that you can still patent the method of application. Epinephrine was first isolated in 1901, the price for the auto-injector EpiPen recently quintuplicated, arguably the product hasn't improved by that order of magnitude.