Everyone understands and accepts the fact that corporations have to show profits, otherwise nobody would buy their stock and the CEO's wouldn't be able to give themselves multi-million dollar bonuses. But there has to be some oversight on corporate greed, otherwise, we will all be working for virtually nothing more than a basic existence of survival while the top 10% enjoys a hedonistic, lavish lifestyle at the cost of the suffering of 90% of the population.
Just one example, and there are literally thousands that I can site. Insulin.
Insulin is an old drug, it was discovered in 1921, nearly 100 years ago, when a medical student injected the hormone extracted from the pancreas of a dog into a diabetic dog and found that it effectively lowered the dog's blood glucose levels to normal. When inventor Frederick Banting discovered insulin in 1923, he refused to put his name on the patent. He felt it was unethical for a doctor to profit off a discovery that would save lives. Banting's co-inventors, James Collip and Charles Best, sold the insulin patent to the University of Toronto for a mere $1. Banting and Macleod were awarded the Nobel Prize in 1923 for the discovery, sharing the prize money with Best and Collip. For the next 60 years, people with diabetes relied on animal insulin – usually from pigs or cows – to survive.
Insulin also became the first protein to be chemically synthesized, in 1963. Researchers were unable to produce it in large quantities, however, so people continued to rely on animal insulin to treat diabetes. Although animal insulin worked well, it wasn’t an exact match to the human hormone and some patients suffered minor side-effects, including immune reactions to the hormone.
Nobel Prize winner Dorothy Hodgkin deciphered the molecular structure of insulin in 1969 using X-ray crystallography. The type of insulin used today came about in 1978 when researchers were able to manufacture a form of human insulin using biotechnology. Scientists genetically modified bacteria to produce the separate A and B chains that make up human insulin and combined these through a chemical process. The result? The mass production of synthetic human insulin. This revolutionised the treatment of diabetes because it meant that insulin could be produced on a mass scale and used without the side-effects associated with animal insulin.
Why does insulin cost so much to patients in the USA and around the world? Why is insulin, a widely sold drug of which most forms are now off-patent, so incredibly expensive?
8 Reasons Why Insulin is so Outrageously Expensive - T1International
1. Only 3 Companies Control 90% of the Global Insulin Market
2. No Generic Insulin
3. Pay-for-Delay Schemes & Lawsuits
4. Patents
5. Politics
6. Price Fixing
7. Pharma Marketing Schemes
8. Payment for Influence (or Silence)
This simple graph illustrates how the 4 phama companies have raised the prices of their insulin.
A Yale study found that one in four patients admitted to cutting back on insulin use because of cost. The consequences have been proven deadly. Three people died in 2017 while rationing their insulin. Three more died in 2018, and just recently, in Jan 2019 a young man died because he couldn't afford his insulin and was rationing it. Alec Holt turning 26 meant his parents' insurance would no longer cover the cost, shooting his monthly cost for insulin and supplies up to $1,300 per month.
Corporate greed is not only immoral it's virtually creating such hardships for people that it's resulting in deaths.
