The pharmaceutical Eli Lilly will cut the price of insulin by 70% and will cap the treatment in the US at $35 a month

An operator works in an insulin vial factory of the pharmaceutical company Eli Lilly in Fegersheim (France), in a 2015 image. FREDERICK FLORIN (AFP)

One of President Joe Biden's great battles has triumphed.

The American pharmaceutical giant Eli Lilly has announced this Wednesday a 70% drop in the price of "the most prescribed insulins" in the country, on which millions of insulin-dependent citizens depend.

Biden has fought during his two years in office to put a limit of 35 dollars a month on a treatment that on the free market amounts to several hundred, and now Eli Lilly has listened to him.

The last time he publicly referred to the need to regulate prices was during the debate on the State of the Union, on February 8.

"Eli Lilly is taking this action to facilitate access to Lilly insulins and to help Americans who may have difficulty navigating a complex [free market] healthcare system, which may prevent them from getting reasonably priced insulin," he said. said in a statement the drugmaker, which is based in Indianapolis and was the first company to market insulin in the country in 1923.

The decision involves setting an automatic limit of $35 a month for people who have private insurance, the ceiling that President Biden has been asking for, and less for those who do not have insurance, such as Medicaid beneficiaries, the system for citizens without resources.

The drugmaker will also reduce the price of its brand-name insulin to $25 a vial starting May 1, making it the cheapest available.

Its current selling price is $82.41 per vial.

The high price of insulin in the US has been a battle horse, with campaigns like that of Senator Bernie Sanders, representative of the most progressive wing of the Democrats.

In 2019, the veteran senator from Vermont organized several caravans to Canada, where the price of the input is significantly lower, to denounce the prohibitive cost of the hormone in his country.

Biden has picked up the gauntlet of vindication, with periodic calls to cap a hormone that more than eight million Americans depend on daily, according to the US Diabetics Association.

According to a Yale University study published in July, for more than 14% of insulin-dependent people in the US, spending on insulin accounts for more than 40% of post-subsistence income, that is, what remains

paying the rent and food.

A “catastrophic” amount, according to the aforementioned investigation, which compromises the well-being of the patients, who in many cases abandoned treatment due to the material impossibility of facing it.

The lifestyle, sedentary lifestyle and poor diet, with a preponderance of processed products, have a great influence on the prevalence of the disease in the country, with more than 30 million registered diabetics, although less than a third of the total depend on the insulin daily.

Insulin prices have more than doubled in the last decade, on average, with a few exceptions, which have skyrocketed.

In 1996, when the pharmaceutical company Eli Lilly launched Humalog, the fast-acting drug most consumed by insulin-dependent people, a vial cost $21.

“Today it costs more than 10 times that amount,” the Yale study noted.