1.3 million Americans are rationing insulin due to high costs
Joe Biden’s United States is in deep crisis. In July there was talk of a technical recession with GDP at -0.9%. But more than the Gross Domestic Product in these hours speaks a research published in the Annals of Internal Medicine by researchers at Harvard Medical School, Hunter College of the City University of New York which estimates how many Americans with diabetes are systematically by rationing their life-saving insulin to save money, they can’t afford it: 1.3 million Americans, 16.5 percent of all adults with diabetes who use it.
Insulin helps regulate the blood sugar level. Diabetes is a chronic disease with a range of problems that can lead to death. If you do not regulate the sugar level with insulin, you risk the serious effects of diabetes on circulation and vascularization, with the possibility of limb amputation, heart problems, vision problems, brain problems, and the creation of non-healing sores. Imagine the disaster for a person’s body.
Worldwide, it is estimated that a person with diabetes suffers an amputation every 20 seconds. Over a million people with diabetes lose a leg as a result of their condition every year worldwide. A disease on the rise among young people. By 2025, it is estimated that 380 million people are affected by diabetes, 7.1% of the adult population. And is the population of one of the most powerful nations in the world in a position to ration their insulin intake?
The cost of the drug remains a barrier for many Americans with diabetes. The rise in inflation also affects medicines, even if the government has tried to intervene in the sector.
The US researchers analyzed data from the National Health Interview Survey for the year 2021, collected by the federal government. The study took as a sample 29,482 adults representative of the US population, arriving at the figure in the US that there are approximately 1.4 million adults with type 1 diabetes, 5.8 million adults with type 2 diabetes and 0.4 million. with diabetes of a different or unknown type they are using insulin.
Analysis indicates that 18.6% of individuals with type 1 diabetes, the most dangerous and for whom skipping insulin can quickly lead to diabetic coma and death, ration insulin. For people with type 2 diabetes, 15.8% ration insulin. Rationing is higher for people under the age of 65 (20.4%) than for people aged 65 or over (11.2%).
Rationing has developed mainly among those who are relatively young, middle-income and black, that is, the subjects who have suffered the most from the effects of the economic crisis.
It also turns out that not taking insulin when it should be more common among middle-income insulin users, 19.8%, while 10.8% of those with higher incomes and the “only” 14.6% of those with low incomes reported having rationed their insulin. The rationing rate is higher among black insulin users (23.2%) than among white and Hispanic insulin users (16%).
The disaster adds to the disaster when we consider that in the United States it is necessary to have insurance coverage for health care. Those without coverage had the highest insulin rationing rate (29.2%), followed by those with private insurance (18.8%); those who have public coverage have the lowest rationing rates. Finally, the researchers showed that insulin rationing is associated with an approximately 50% increase in the percentage of people with diabetes who feel overwhelmed by the burden of living with their disease.
“This is a life-saving drug. Insulin rationing can have life-threatening consequences “, Dr. Adam Gaffney, the study’s lead author and an intensive care physician at the Cambridge Health Alliance in Massachusetts, told CNN.
“In the ICU, I have cared for patients who have life-threatening complications because they couldn’t afford this life-saving drug,” Gaffney repeated. “we have allowed pharmaceutical companies to set the agenda, and this is to the detriment of our patients”.
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