Eli Lilly caps the cost of insulin at $35 a month

Apparently they already had a discount card program but it may have been hard to access. The new program automatically applies for Medicare and many commercial insurance.

They are also reducing the list price of generic insulin lispro, Humalog, and Humulin insulin and mixtures, but they'll still be pretty expensive at list price.

But most interesting to me, they're introducing an insulin glargine-aglr pen at 5 pk for $92 list price. Basaglar (Lilly's own glargine) is $326. Lantus is around $500. The glargine-aglr is supposed to be bioequivalent in humans, we'll have to see from experience if that's true for cats.

So basically in response to legislation, presumably to head off stricter legislation they've come up with a program to allow people to only pay $35/month. They're not lowering or capping the price, they're introducing a program modeled after their other systems in which they claim the price is only $X but if you ever mess up, or if you don't know about this magic program, or if you don't continuously ensure you're still following the terms of the program your price spikes again.

That they aren't actually lowering the price means that they very clearly have no intention of making this "discount" program actually usable.

The only reason for this program is to allow them to claim they are not maliciously price gouging in order to avoid legislation actually mandating they comply with existing anti-price gouging and anti-monopoly laws until they can buy some new congress people and senators, and then just ramp up the difficulty in applying for the discount.

This is not new behaviour: every one of the big pharmaceuticals has had medications that they have made "cheap" on a program, and then made the program not apply anymore once changing to an alternative is no longer reasonable.

Just as the CEO of Pfizer and Moderna demonstrated with the >$100 per $1 vaccine shot: they want to charge the market "value" of being alive for absolutely anything they have the opportunity to, which is definitionally price gouging. The management of these companies is pathologically opposed to any ethical pricing model. My proposal: any drug that they or their family or their friends ever needs must be priced - for them - such that they are left with only just enough assets and cashflow to afford 2 weeks of planned expenses, including any income or assets in trust funds or in other family/friend's name.

> In November, Eli Lilly’s stock price dropped sharply after a fake tweet from an imposter account falsely claimed that the company was making insulin free, renewing focus on its cost.

I wish this wasn't getting regurgitated as fact. The entire market dipped that day. A joke tweet probably had nothing to do with it.