California Governor Gavin Newsom announced a partnership with drugmaker Civica Rx to offer insulin at a dramatically lower cost on Saturday, during a visit to a Kaiser Permanente warehouse that stores thousands of doses of insulin in Downey, California. , Saturday.
Damian Dovarganes/AP
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Damian Dovarganes/AP
California Governor Gavin Newsom announced a partnership with drugmaker Civica Rx to offer insulin at a dramatically lower cost on Saturday, during a visit to a Kaiser Permanente warehouse that stores thousands of doses of insulin in Downey, California. , Saturday.
Damian Dovarganes/AP
California Gov. Gavin Newsom announced a new contract with nonprofit drugmaker Civica Rx, a move that brings the state one step closer to creating its own line of insulin to lower the cost of the drug.
Once the Food and Drug Administration approves the drugs, Newsom said at a news conference Saturday, Civica, under the 10-year deal with the state worth $50 million, will begin manufacturing the new CalRx insulins. later this year.
The contract covers three forms of insulin: glargine, lispro and aspart. Civica expects them to be interchangeable with popular brand name insulins: Sanofi’s Lantus, Eli Lilly’s Humalog and Novo Nordisk’s Novolog, respectively.
State label insulins won’t cost more than $30 per 10-milliliter vial, and no more than $55 for a box of five pre-filled pen cartridges, for both insured and uninsured patients. The medicines will be available nationwidethe governor’s office said.
“This is a big deal, folks,” the governor said. “This is not happening anywhere else in the United States.”
A 10-milliliter vial of insulin can cost as much as $300, Newsom said. Under the new contract, patients who pay out-of-pocket for insulin could save up to $4,000 per year. The federal government this year put a $35 monthly limit on out-of-pocket costs on insulin for certain Medicare enrollees, including senior citizens.
Advocates have pushed for years to make insulin more affordable. According to a report published last year in the journal Annals of Internal Medicine, 1 in 6 Americans with diabetes who use insulin said the cost of the drug forces them to ration their supply.
“This is an extraordinary move in the pharmaceutical industry, not just for insulin, but potentially for all kinds of drugs,” said Robin Feldman, a professor at the University of California San Francisco School of Law, told Kaiser Health News. “It’s a very difficult industry to disrupt, but California is ready to do just that.”
The news comes after a handful of drugmakers that dominate the insulin market recently said they would lower the list prices of their insulin. (List prices, set by the drug manufacturer, are often what uninsured patients, or those with high deductibles, must pay out-of-pocket for the drug.)
After rival Eli Lilly announced a plan to reduce the prices of some of your insulin by 70%, Novo Nordisk and Sanofi did the same thing last week, saying they would cut some list prices for some of their insulin products by as much as 75% next year. Together, the three companies control 90% of the US insulin supply.
Newsom said the state’s effort addresses the underlying problem of unaffordable insulin without forcing taxpayers to subsidize drugmakers’ exorbitant prices.
“What this does,” he said of the California plan, “is a game changer. This fundamentally reduces cost. Period. Period.”
Insulin is a critical drug for people with type 1 diabetes, whose body does not produce enough insulin. People with Type 1 need insulin daily in order to survive.
Insulin contract is part of California’s larger plan calRx initiative to produce generic drugs under the state’s own label. Newsom says the state is pushing to make generics naloxone next.
