“Cosima Mosher was diagnosed with Type 1 diabetes in January 2019 at the age of 11. After two days in the hospital, she realized her life would never be the same. Her mother, Heather, recounted that one minute they were celebrating the New Year and the next she was in the intensive care unit watching her little girl hooked up to a million life-saving machines. Cosima told her mom she suddenly felt so alone and that she wanted to go home and be normal again.
Like so many who have their lives upended by diabetes, Cosima knew her life would never be the same.
It was hard for Heather to watch her daughter face the burden of a life-long chronic illness. She also immediately recognized the family’s financial burden of having a child who needs insulin. If she lost her job and health insurance, how would she afford insulin for her daughter? Heather was also fearful knowing Cosima will someday have to face this burden too – always knowing she will need to have a job with good insurance, just to stay alive.
For those with diabetes who are insulin dependent like ourselves, insulin is as necessary to live as water, but it is priced as expensive as gold. Insulin list prices have increased, in some cases, by as much as 1,000 percent in the past two decades. Doctors Frederick Banting and Charles Best are credited with discovering insulin in 1921, and doctors John MacLeod and John Collip are recognized for developing it as a treatment. In January 1922, a 14-year-old boy who had become bedridden with Type 1 diabetes became the first patient given insulin, saving his life. The doctors sold their patent for insulin back to the University of Toronto for only $1, believing that insulin should not be used for profit but should be made available to everyone. That is why the price increases in this 100-year-old drug are so shocking and distressing.”
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