Probably not. In my country a 10 ml bottle of Novorapid (=Novolog) would cost approximately 17 euros (about 19-20 USD) for someone who hasn’t reached their 385 euro annual deductible yet. Things differ between European countries and their respective health care systems, but you can probably assume that prices in Finland are in the same ballpark.
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Thanks a bunch, @Boerenkool. Super helpful. Gotta double check.
I left on a flight to China once w/o insulin when I was young and super idiotic. I thought I would “get a deal on insulin,” when I arrived. I didn’t. They charged me $300 per bottle because i was an American. So annoying.
The price in the UK is zero for Type 1 diabetics. I think it might be zero for all IDDs now but I left the UK in 1992. This is because there is a single flat prescription charge for every prescription (each medication) but people with identified chronic conditions, including T1D, get prescriptions at no charge. The current charge in England is currently £9.90 but is zero in the other principalities.
The actual charge is somewhat irrelevant because a large part of the cost is embedded in the health care system. Sometimes, as in the US and Taiwan, there are explicit “insurance” charges; about USD30/month in Taiwan, and this is effectively compulsory, as it is in the US (no insurance, no health care). Other times, as in the UK, the cost is part of the taxation “general fund”; really compulsory.
The US also levies an employment tax of 2.9% of wages, split equally between employer and employee, which pays for healthcare in the future for people who get to live to 65 and attain, or maintain, residence or citizenship.
A lot of the time, almost all the time, people don’t track where the money comes from or where it goes.
I don’t know how medication prices are controlled in Holland and I don’t want to believe Google when I’m talking to an expert 
It looks like the US system where individuals pay for the medications they use; that system is open to corruption like that which happens in the US, where the price is artificially inflated by one party or another to cover golf or a similarly unrelated activity.
On the Finnish system, given that an ole asiantuntija, mutta asiantuntijaa ei näytä olevan paikalla, the payment for insulin seems to be €4.50 each time. The underlying payment system, however, is more like the US one with a “copay” which is part of the total cost the rest being paid by insurance.
All systems where a proportion or all of a medications nominal cost are paid by the patient are open to exploitation. States can regulate until they are blue in the face but it won’t change the fact that the patient has no choice; get the treatment or get the scythe. Fixed costs are ok, exploitable perhaps but it’s easy to legislate against an insurer who wants to get the fixed cost per day rather than per month… (I’m not supporting fixed costs, I think the approach is brain-dead, but I understand why they are used.)
Oh no, no no: I did not say that. I spoke in the first person and I said that it is my fault. What I implied is that it is our fault; the fault of the US people. It is, after all, our government although I admit that may of us deny responsibility for our government even though we elected it.
Believe me, John. We are trying our best.
Even when I’m fast asleep, my brain is thinking how to counter the Novo guy and terrible things he plans to say about us. He might actually be a friendly, though. Maybe they come to make peace. But this is Minneapolis and I aint ■■■■■■■ around. I did laundry today. I have two shirts I can wear that relate to Finland - both have a soldier from the Winter War on them - one has Simo Häyhä. In both they are holding guns. (That’s where the American comes out). One reads ominously, “Winter is coming.”
I hope there is no lecturing about the imagery. I assume they take my meaning. I am the living embodiment of my DOJ paper.
Those are my options because I don’t think the “Phuck Pharma” tshirt with syringes all over it works in this particular case.
P.S. The doctors are driving me insane online. They are completley without moral compass or judgement or any ability to be reasonable. But I got my G7 today and just inserted one, so they get some points for competence today.
@jbowler Ref your comment about costs and the US, I tried the other day to figure out who is actually paying for my insulin and couldn’t figure it out. I figure many costs are hidden from US personnel. Either its Medicare/Medicaid, private insurance, Tricare, Tricare for Life, the VA, etc. Some one’s got to be paying the bill, the manufacturers cost of production, the manufacturer’s profit margin, the PBMs profit margin, or other. I couldn’t do it, the verbage of whether Medicare pays, Tricare pays, the manufacturer adjusts, or the PBM adjusts. It all brought back a saying from a USAF Flying Training patch: “It’s all done with smoke, monkey wires, and mirrors!”
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I still can’t make sense of this. Novo (Novo Nordisk) is a Danish company and their headquarters are right next to Copenhagen (København). They speak Danish. According to the ever unreliable AI:
Only about 0.2% of the population in Denmark speaks Finnish (Suomi).
If there is a lingua franca it’s probably going to be English, though apparently Norwegian is sufficiently close to be mutually intelligible and perhaps Swedish too; the latter would probably work for the Finns as well.
Are you thinking of Nokia? (I.e. the Finnish company which was first to market smartphones.)
It is unclear to me too where this is going. Novo is indeed a Danish company and strictly speaking Finland is not considered part of Scandinavia. Their language is in fact not even related to other European languages, with the exception of Estonian and Hungarian.
I’m not sure myself either. Insurance companies can do some negotiating and as a result may decide to cover only one particular brand of a certain drug. The drawback of this system is that one generic drug manufacturer may become the monopolist for a particular drug, which makes us vulnerable to shortages when that manufacturer experiences production issues, because there’s no other manufacturer left to jump in anymore.
Honestly, sometimes you just have to say WTF and keep it moving! Looking forward to hearing your thoughts on the boots on the ground diabetes talk too.
The Nordics are coming - the Finns, primarily.
The Finnish Ambassador will come. I think they want to recruit people from MN to move to Finland and to pave the road for MN-Finnish business partnerships. In MN, there was a lot of Finnish immigration up along the northshore of Lake Superior because it looks like Finland - it’s cold, there’s forests and lakes. There are saunas everywhere up there, still to this day. They would live up there in the deep woods and trade with the tribes. The Northern part of MN is really it’s own seperate culture and identity.
For example, when federal senators want to drum up support for the Ukraine, they do there? Why? Because Finns (like Ukrainians and all of Russias neighbors) dislike Russia. It’s a nice meaty target for fundraising. I told them to network with the Swedes in the Twin Cities when they need money because that’s who has all the money. They will do that, for example, we have a (kinda) secret Swedish consulate located inside a mansion that houses the Swedish museum and so when I volunteered there, Sweden would call them to pick up ambassadors at the airport.
Finnish Americans from Michigan and Minnesota all along the lake shore are coming to Minneapolis. But REAL Finns will come (like the Ambassador) and Paleface. They will bring economists & engineers with them - because Nordics are just ALL engineers by profession, for some reason. But they will bring a Danish-American who worked in Denmark for a long time, teaches at Berkley, and wrote a book called “Nordic Capitalism,” which they politley suggested that I read. He’s the man who has relationships with Novo Nordisk.
They read what I wrote to DOJ because apparently it pops up when you google my name. In that paper, I talk about problems in healthcare impacting diabetics. It’s really a paper about the experience of monopolized markets thru the lens of diabetes in the Twin Cities (Minneapolis and Saint Paul, MN).
They are concerned about negotiating business realtionships here. This city has had a lot of turmoil in the past 8 -10 years. They want to respond to things in my paper, llike this:
Now, one of you already wrote to me and told me that he disagrees with my claim that Finland has the highest incidence of T1D. He said they just do MORE testing for T1D and that’s why incidence appears higher. So, I apologize in advance if I say anything invalid. But we discussed that on TU for years and no one ever made that point to me before. My bad.
I expect some response to statements I made, like this:
Now, it’s important to understand that Minnesota was the first state to sue the insulin manufacturers (as @jbowler importantly brings up earlier in this thread).
It’s also important to understand that Scott mentioned today that Novo is rebranding itself.
