Thursday, March 2: Shaming the Shameless
It's a pity really, Eli Lilly is such a cute name for a girl
After a viral fake tweet a few months ago, the drug makers at Eli Lilly were really in the toilet (emotionally, not financially of course). To cheer themselves up, the pharma giant announced this week they’re cutting prices for some older insulins later this year and immediately giving more patients access to a cap on some of the costs they pay to fill prescriptions.
In reality these changes come as lawmakers and patient advocates continue to mount pressure on the legal drug cartel equivalent to do something about their egregious prices. Lilly said it will cut the list prices for its most commonly prescribed insulin, Humalog, and for another insulin, Humulin, by 70% or more in the fourth quarter, which starts in October. List prices are what a drugmaker sets for a product and what people who have no insurance or plans with high deductibles are often stuck paying.
According to a spokesperson for the corrupt drug manufacturer, the current list price for a 10-milliliter vial of the mealtime insulin Humalog is $274.70. After the price changes, that will fall to $66.40. Likewise, the same amount of Humulin currently lists at $148.70. That will drop to $44.61. If there’s one good thing to come out of Elon Musk buying Twitter, it was the Wild Wild West-ification of parody accounts late last year.
Side Items
Shaming Apartheid’s First Lady: How do we shame the shameless? What’s an existential crisis to an apartheid state? Apparently hundreds of demonstrators gathered yesterday outside the hair salon where Sara Netanyahu was getting fixed up chanting, “shame, shame”. The incident took place in an upscale neighborhood in Tel Aviv, and the president’s response was to send in hundreds of police to safely escort his wife into a limousine and whisk her away. Here’s hoping the Netanyahu’s never experience another moment of peace, in this life or the next
“Haole” Hate Crime: Two native Hawaiian men are being charged with a federal hate crime in the brutal beating of a white man who tried to move into their remote, traditional fishing village. Kaulana Alo-Kaonohi and Levi Aki Jr. say it wasn’t Christopher Kunzelman’s race that provoked them, but his entitled and disrespectful attitude. It’s undoubtedly a complex case, difficult to fully comprehend without also considering Hawaii’s history of U.S. colonization and the 1893 overthrow of the Hawaiian Kingdom by a group of American businessmen