328
Communist China Just Cured Diabetes and America's Insulin Industry is Not Happy About it
(open.substack.com)
this post was submitted on 04 Feb 2026
328 points (88.1% liked)
Late Stage Capitalism
2741 readers
22 users here now
A place for for news, discussion, memes, and links criticizing capitalism and advancing viewpoints that challenge liberal capitalist ideology. That means any support for any liberal capitalist political party (like the Democrats) is strictly prohibited.
A zero-tolerance policy for bigotry of any kind. Failure to respect this will result in a ban.
RULES:
1 Understand the left starts at anti-capitalism.
2 No Trolling
3 No capitalist apologia, anti-socialism, or liberalism, liberalism is in direct conflict with the left. Support for capitalism or for the parties or ideologies that uphold it are not welcome or tolerated.
4 No imperialism, conservatism, reactionism or Zionism, lessor evil rhetoric. Dismissing 3rd party votes or 'wasted votes on 3rd party' is lessor evil rhetoric.
5 No bigotry, no racism, sexism, antisemitism, homophobia, transphobia, ableism, or any type of prejudice.
6 Be civil in comments and no accusations of being a bot, 'paid by Putin,' Tankie, etc. This includes instance shaming.
founded 1 year ago
MODERATORS
you are viewing a single comment's thread
view the rest of the comments
view the rest of the comments
wasn't the original inventor of insulin insistent that it remain cheap and readily available?
Banting and Best sold the patent for $1. But they were Canadian.
The cost of insulin has nothing to do with intellectual property.
The current price of insulin is still directly affected by patents. Yes, they are still getting patents 100 years later with analogs and biosimilars.
We certainly could manufacture the original formula for cheap, but no one wants to do that. Capitalism and intellectual property combined are the culprits.
The government could fix this a number of ways, but it hasn't.
They could have run a non-profit organization that leases out access to the patent, with conditions on pricing and availability. IMO, the pair thought that a for-profit health industry would do the right thing, and were betrayed by the rich bastards of society.
As mentioned in the post, yes.