Monopolists want to create human inkjet printers

The war on your pancreas continues.

Cory Doctorow

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A package of HP inkjet ink; it has been modified to incorporate the word- and logo-marks of Insulet and Dexcom. The image on the front of the box has been replaced with a man’s bare stomach; the man is wearing an insulin pump. The sides of the box have been overlaid with a Matrix ‘code waterfall’ effect. The menacing red eye of HAL9000 from 2001: A Space Odyssey glares out of the box.Image: Cryteria (modified) https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:HAL9000.svg CC BY 3.0: https://creativecommons

Even if you don’t have diabetes, you can’t have missed that there’s something really terrible going on with how Americans with diabetes control their illness. Insulin — a century-old drug whose inventors refused any patents — has experienced double-digit, year-on-year price hikes (1123% between 2009–2017 alone!):

https://www.nbcnews.com/business/consumer/desperate-families-driven-black-market-insulin-n730026

Moreover, this is a uniquely American circumstance. In Canada, insulin remains affordable, which is why Americans — especially parents of kids with diabetes — form caravans and cross the northern border to buy insulin from Canadian pharmacies:

https://www.cbc.ca/news/canada/nova-scotia/americans-diabetes-cross-canada-border-insulin-1.5125988

It’s why Americans are starting to brew their own insulin:

https://openinsulin.org/

And it’s why California is getting into the insulin-manufacturing business:

https://khn.org/news/article/california-wants-to-slash-insulin-prices-by-becoming-a-drugmaker-can-it-succeed/

Why do Americans with diabetes go into debt to buy insulin? Why do they ration their…

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Cory Doctorow
Cory Doctorow

Written by Cory Doctorow

Writer, blogger, activist. Blog: https://pluralistic.net; Mailing list: https://pluralistic.net/plura-list; Mastodon: @pluralistic@mamot.fr

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