It's easy to pick on a group of people with diabetes, like everything it overlooks the full story. Cardiovascular disease and nervous system take more of the budget.
http://content.digital.nhs.uk/catalogue/PUB20200 pages 188 - 200 are all the diabetic meds. It's for 2015 but close.
It seems that about 1/3 of cardiovascular disease is people who are already known to have Type2, with anther 1/3 being people will issues with insulin resistance (carb intolerance) who have not yet been labeled Type2.
Just as well we don't live in the US. The pharmaceutical companies will cite their R&D costs as being their excuse for making huge profits. List prices in non-US countries average 41 percent of US net drug prices for the 15 companies that sell the 20 top-selling drugs in the US, with a range from 38 percent in the UK to 52 percent in Denmark. Overall in 2015 the premium earned by US net prices exceeding other countries’ list prices generated $116 billion, while that year the companies spent just 66 percent of that amount, or $76 billion, on their global R&D.
To cover the cost of R&D (and payments to doctors to enable doctors to learn about new drugs) the pharmaceutical companies do need to make that much money. Most pharmaceutical companies are now only doing research that is likely to result in sales in the USA (hence a lot of them have closed down their UK R&D labs).
Lets be very glad that the USA health insurance companies are willing to indirectly fund the research that should be funded by governments.
When I lived in Cambridge I had lots of friends who work for pharmaceutical companies, they expected to spend up to 10 years doing research on a possible new drug knowing that less than 10% of research will result in anything of benefit. Hence you must remember how much risk pharmaceutical companies are taking by doing research, companies will only take large risks if there is a possibility of it resulting in very large profits.
This issue with
governments not funding research is one of the reasons we have never had the large scale studies done in a way that will convince most GPs of LCHF. Setting up a 5 year randomised study on the effect of LCHF is hard enough without having no funding to do it……..
The hope we now have is that there is one USA base company that is doing
large scale doctor supported LCHF funded by the USA health insurance “system”, they seem to be willing to except payment based on savings on Insulin and other drugs. This company has lots of backing from venture capitalist who see it as a way to print money and normally invest in IT companies. Like most venture capitalist back companies they are likely to fail, but if they don't fail they will transform the treatment of Type2 in the USA, and hence the rest of the world.
My MIL throws her statins in the bin every 2 months, she's 90 and there's a part of my head that says if you can reach 90 with your cholesterol the way it is, why try and change it. What I have tried to tell her is that she should tell her GP that she doesn't want or need them at her age, but she doesn't want him to give her a lecture and so throws them away.
The best option may be to hand back the packets at collection time to the chemist that way the GP will not get fined by the NHS for not prescribing satin to enough people.
