NEW YORK – New York Attorney General Letitia James Friday secured an agreement with one of the nation’s largest insulin manufacturers, Novo Nordisk Inc. , to cap the price of insulin at $35 per monthly prescription for uninsured New Yorkers for five years.
The agreement also requires Novo Nordisk to implement a program with pharmacies to let uninsured patients know before they pay that they are eligible for the insulin cap.
The agreement follows earlier agreements with two other large insulin makers, Eli Lilly and Sanofi, to cap insulin prices at $35 a month for uninsured New Yorkers.
More than 10 percent of New Yorkers have diabetes, and it is estimated that 464,000 of them rely on insulin every day. New Yorkers who live in the state’s poorest neighborhoods are 70 percent more likely to have diabetes. In fact, more than 16 percent of New York adults with diabetes have an annual household income of less than $25,000.
An investigation by the Office of the Attorney General found that the list prices set by insulin manufacturers for patients resulted in significant out-of-pocket costs for certain insulin users, causing some to ration their insulin or forgo it altogether. Over the past two decades, the list prices for insulin have increased dramatically, with prices from all manufacturers nearly tripling from 2002 to 2013. For a person with Type 1 diabetes, annual spending on insulin averaged $2,864 in 2012, and by 2016, nearly doubled to an average of $5,705. These dramatic cost increases were not driven by insulin manufacturing costs, which by one estimate would be no more than $133 per person per year.
