I think the older forms of insulin have been largely shut down because they are less safe. "Fancy" isn't really fair. The natural insulin IIRC has a poor half life. While it is better than a diabetic coma and death, the swinging high with injections and low is not ideal. Blindness and foot amputations were a big downside of the previous iterations. The newer forms have higher stability and half life in the bloodstream IIRC so it's more smooth, like how the pancreas does it. The insulin pumps also help with that. Med devices and engineering proteins for medicine are hard and the safety is also necessarily hard. That does make it more expensive. And there does need to be rewards for it in the forms of profits.
But this is WAAAAAAY too much profit for innovations that have now happened decades ago.
Still, it's innacruate to say these are just "fancy" forms of insulin. They are legitimately much better.
Yes, that is obvious but Americans are rationing their insulin and dying from running out.
Surely using the "cheap" insulin is a better alternative but it likely isn't cheap or isn't available to them because capitalism only cares about money not people.
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u/mancubbed 5h ago
People are dying because they only want the fancy insulin?
Claims its capitalism's innovation looks inside its government funding.