What pump is this child on ? My grandaughter has an insulin pump and her infusion sets are $160 a month and insulin reservoirs are $50 a month if you buy them with no insurance. Other then that the only things required is a glucose tester and test strips and lancets, syringes for manual shots, and the insulin itself. Insulin being the medication and the most expensive item I cannot see any insurance/especially medicaid not covering insulin, my grandaughters insulin if bought retail would be about $700.00 a month. But $2500 a month just for the supplies listed above is way off the chart.
Those test strips are not cheap, especially if you need to test a couple of times a day. They can run another $100/month or more. The meters are free so you have to buy a certain kind of test strip (reminds me of the inexpensive AIO printers that require you to use their specific toners that over time become costly).
I don’t know much, if anything, about Type 1 but spouse took diabetes meds for years. There were a few kinds of pills in addition to the insulin. My memory is that they weren’t cheap.
Your calculation for your granddaughter is running close to $1K/month, with insurance. For most families that is a good deal of $$$.
It was $600 just for my son’s insulin. (Almost $200 per bottle) The sets were $35 each and he needed about 15 of those a month. (He had an issue with his immune system and the sites got infected easily) So that’s another $500. No idea how much the reservoirs cost. His kidney medication was hundreds more. (I don’t know how much because he didn’t need that until he was out of the house. I do know that he had to quit taking it when he was laid off) Add in the strips and it came to about $1500 a month.
Feeding the hypoglycemia was it’s own issue.
I thin that is what she is complaining about. The cost increase is due to the fact that her CHIP program will not cover this medication anymore and the cost seems very high for what they say it is.
$2500 sounds about right for the RETAIL price. Brand-name insulin generally has a supposed retail price between 300 and 350 dollars a vial, at least according to my mail-order prescription documentation.
That’s what they CLAIM it costs. . . nowhere close to what they actually charge. . .