Several times during the debate last night candidates brought up the cost of insulin. Is insulin cost supposed to be a proxy for state of health care system as a whole? If so, why?
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Insulin is _incredibly_ cheap to make and the rest of the world pays very little, if anything, for it. In the US, however, it’s expensive and the price goes up. It isn’t exactly a proxy for healthcare overall; I’d think of it more as “The go-to example of unnecessary and unfair price gouging by the health care industry.” Also, due to the existence of Type 1 Diabetes, it’s often a major cost of parents of young children. Many expensive healthcare treatments relate to conditions faced by adults, which others might think of as “their own fault.” Insulin is often a need of _children_ and saying “you are price-gouging kids who haven’t made any bad decisions as adults” makes it even more of a “pure” example than, say, Ozempic which is a really amazing treatment but treats a condition with less sympathy.
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