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Comment by kristopolous | Hacker News Reader

I know a number of people who have diabetes and not vast financial resources (including the family of a teenaged nephew of mine). The current medical solution takes a significant and ever-present financial toll on them. Something like this would be absolutely life changing for those people who can't easily afford on-going, lifetime treatment.

I really hope it works.

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I wonder how many will not wait for the study and just try it.

It's not a cheap drug though - about $0.75 per pill.

A heck of a lot cheaper than insulin, test strips, needles, or CGMs, pumps, etc. The clinical trial is 1 pill once a day. $300 / year versus upwards of $10,000 / year.

$0.75 seems incredibly inexpensive to me. Modafinil, by comparison, can be $50 per dose.

Or even on the higher end, some MS drugs like Copaxone can be upwards of $200 to $300 per dose.

$0.75 per pill is super cheap especially for a novel treatment. What are you talking about dude?

Blood glucose test strips are about $0.25 per strip and most diabetics test themselves multiple times per day. Anyone using insulin will pay substantially more per day.

$0.75/pill seems like a steal.

Yep. On my insurance plan, I spend about $250 per month on Type I Diabetes supplies. That adds up.

An interesting side effect of how insurance plans are structured where I work finds the people with diabetes or recurring medical expenses are usually better off on the HSA plans offered as the go to 90/100% payment of costs once the yearly deductible is met.

Considering the hassles that my mom has with medicaid/medicare (not sure exactly which one it is) since the ACA with obtaining her insulin and possible cure is great news. She actually has to plan trips around shipping dates because some supplies will not ship unless X number of days passed. Worse, the costs went up. Between insulin, the pump, test strips, and mandatory examinations, its not an easy road.

That adds up to $3000 per year. That adds up to $300,000 per century. That adds up to $3,000,000 per millennia. That adds up to $35,144,750 since the beginning of the Holocene epoch.

These days, the costs of addition are out of control.

It varies a lot, though. My T1D supplies (as a college student on my parents' insurance) cost more like $50-$75 a month.

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