David Lazarus on living with diabetes
I just spotted this Marketplace interview with David Lazarus of the Los Angeles Times. He was diagnosed with diabetes in November 2007.The title of the interview is 'Living with (and paying for) diabetes'. When he was asked about what he's learned about the costs of living with this chronic disease, he answered
They're extensive. In some cases, some diabetics tell me the spend about $10,000 a year on this thing. You're talking about your blood glucose meter, you're talking about the test strips that are required for that (and I do as many as seven to 10 tests a day), but there are other things as well: you've got you're insulin, you've got your needles, you've got the lancets you need to poke your finger -- again 7 to 10 times a day -- and so you have a lot of fixed costs attached to a chronic disease.He also talks about the $1 per strip cost. Maybe with his focus on publicizing the costs something may happen.
One of these days some company will wake up to the idea that they can provide accurate strips for $0.50 each and capture a big share of the market. I can't wait for that to happen.
Labels: costs, diabetes, interview
posted by Bernard @ 2:29 AM
3 Comments:
I know. Over $3,000 per year in strips. I think maybe that doesn't sink in for all of us because the insured mostly think about costs in terms of copays.
Bernard - don't know if you've visited your local Wal-Mart lately, but they have their ReliOn test strips for about $22.95/50 (best I remember). My insurance provider only covers 100 strips/month so I suppliment w/these. They are in individual foil packets and aren't quite as convenient, but other than that they serve quite nicely.
I do wish the price of name brand strips would come down though.
Very interesting article. I think having someone with exposure to the issue goes a long way towards making the issue known to the public.
One of the issues on the cost equation is that so far, the low-cost providers of testing supplies seem to be low quality, with variability from lab to home test results being larger than the 20% range seen in brand-names, lending credibility to the argument you get what you pay for.
Oh, BTW, you might consider replacing the link for David Lazarus' diabetes diagnosis with the Google cache link, because the original seems to have been purged. Try
http://www.google.com/search?q=cache:ZTAHZNRpp6oJ:www.latimes.com/news/columnists/la-fi-lazarus7oct07,1,649907.column%3Fcoll%3Dla-news-columns%26ctrack%3D1%26cset%3Dtrue+http://www.latimes.com/news/columnists/la-fi-lazarus7oct07&hl=en&ct=clnk&cd=1&gl=us .
Regards,
Scott Strumello
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