Written by Madeleine Kando   

I purposely waited before writing this story. Had I written it right after the events unfolded, it would have oozed foul language, profanities and curses. It would have sounded uneducated and unreliable, and you, the reader would have classified it as one of those emotional rants that does not deserve serious attention. But this is one of countless, mostly untold, stories that gives you a whiff of the stench that blows in your face, every time you open the door onto the world of Health Insurance in the United States.

Diabetes:
My daughter has Diabetes Type 1. You could call this disease a freak accident of nature. It happens when the immune system starts to attack itself and destroys the insulin producing cells in the pancreas. Twice-a day, my daughter has to take insulin injections, to keep her blood sugar from going too high or too low. Otherwise she ends up in a 'diabetic coma' and dies. It's as simple as that.

People often associate diabetes with a bad life-style, people eating too much and causing their own demise. But Juvenile Diabetes Type 1 sets in as a child or young adult and has nothing to do with how much or how little you eat. Some professionals think it is triggered by a virus combined with some hereditary trait. The bottom line is, at around the age of 21, my daughter woke up one day and she had it. For no reason whatsoever.

High deductible Insurance:
My daughter has a high deductible health plan. Republicans are pushing this type of health insurance as 'consumer driven healthcare'. If people have to pay more for something, they will use less of it and take care of their health better. This type of reasoning is like asking a person in a famine ravaged country to pay more for food, expecting them to get healthier by eating less. Taking less insulin would not make my daughter healthier, it would kill her.
These plans are a gold mine for the insurance companies and they have been pushing them onto small business owners with great gusto. Employers can now shift the burden of the cost onto their employees. the insurance company forks in the premium and don’t pay out anything until the high deductible is met. It is the price people pay for coverage of 'catastrophic' events. It's an emergency plan. In my daughter's case, her deductible is so high that her out of pocket cost for insulin for an entire year will not even cover her deductible.

Insulin:
Insulin was discovered in 1923 by 2 Canadian scientists, Fred Banting and Charles Best, who sold their patent to the University of Toronto for a dollar, hoping that the product would be produced quickly to save lives. Eli Lilly, the company that holds the current patent on the rapid-acting insulin 'humalog', originally sold it cheaply and abundantly, but soon new versions of the drug were invented, patented and prices began to soar. Now what used to be sold for a dollar a dose, costs $100.
Why is Insulin so expensive?

Eli Lilly makes $3.6 billion on their branded insulin every year. The FDA has never issued any guidelines for other companies to develop a generic version, which would lower the price considerably, because Eli Lilly and other biopharmaceuticals have convinced the powers that be that developing a generic brand would be 'unsafe'. Even when the patent runs out, Eli Lilly will still be one of three companies that are monopolizing the insulin market.
No regulations:

When I realized that my daughter would no longer have access to her insulin, I called the General Attorney's Office to see if there were any State laws that would require a private health insurance company to cover this most basic of life-saving medications, without making her pay out of pocket. There are no such laws. Not on the federal or the state level. Even though insulin is saving millions of lives, it is not even considered a 'preventive' medication. Why? Because it doesn't prevent people from developing diabetes! The fact that insulin prevents someone from DYING does not qualify it as a 'preventive' medication.

The sheer barbarity of this situation makes me want to puke. Before insulin was invented, children with diabetes lay in hospital beds, rapidly descending in diabetic comas, waiting to die. Insulin has been available for almost an entire century and children are still dying of diabetes because the pharmaceutical companies keep the price of insulin beyond the reach of poor families' income. Do we call this progress? Do we call this 'health care'?

Even Obamacare has shown to have absolutely no effect on the power and influence of the drug and health insurance industries. The new regulations do not protect Americans against exorbitant drug prices, they do not prevent an insurance company from bundling pharmaceuticals and medical care as part of an exorbitant deductible.

Competition
America is big, it is a lot bigger than Holland, a country where Health Care is mandatory and highly regulated. Even though the US has 18 times more people than the Netherlands, it only has slightly more insurance companies, which makes the American health insurance market much less competitive. It is less competitive but also less regulated. This gives the health insurance companies far too much power. The maximum out of pocket expense for basic insurance in The Netherlands is around $400 per year. If you have diabetes, it is mandatory that insurance companies cover the treatment and supplies that diabetics need and because insurance companies have to compete with each other, they often negotiate better prices for drugs. Those politicians who tout the advantages of a 'market driven' health care system as opposed to 'socialized medicine', don't really know what they are talking about.

Conclusion:
There are 26 million people with diabetes in the United States. That is 8% of the population. Without insulin these people get sick or, if they have type 1, like my daughter, they die. She didn't ask to become diabetic, but she has the added misfortune of living in a country where human decency and common sense laws are non-existent when it comes to health care. Shame on you America.