Impact of Lobbying on People With Diabetes
Amy
London
Transparency matters, particularly to those whose day-to-day lives are ruled by the actions of big multinational corporations that exist to make a profit. People with type 1 diabetes, for example, are reliant on insulin to survive. Insulin prices vary widely from country to country, from about £4 to £40 a bottle (lasting around a month), helping the insulin industry reach annual profits of over £15billion in 2013. To put these massive numbers in context, this figure is equal to half of the entire Welsh economy. In 2015 alone, pharmaceutical companies declared a spend of nearly £27million lobbying EU policymakers. It's shocking that the monopoly of insulin-producing companies, and so many other pharmaceutical companies, are able to secretly exert pressure on policymakers to allow them to make such gross profits by making people pay such a high price for their survival.