I certainly agree with the free-market solution.
Working in the pharmaceutical industry and understanding how time-consuming and complex insulin manufacturing is, I was only trying to underscore that even with high manufacturing volumes, it's still expensive to make. It would be very difficult for a generic manufacturer to come in and make it cheaper.
That said, I do think there's an issue with diabetes' supply chain in general when it comes to pharmacy benefit managers, or PBMs. They claim to offer "leverage" by purchasing large volumes from wholesalers, and then they receive rebates--they never get passed onto customers. Something about the model just strikes me as wrong, and PBMs likely exist because of government regulations and licensing. I think insulin pricing could be made much cheaper by squeezing PBMs out of the picture.
Then in that case, if no saving can be achieved by manufacturing an older insulin, and if the only thing keeping prices up are the PBMs you refer to, a possible “solution” would be through the pharmacy side - open one that actually passes on the discount.
The general problem I see in all these types of situations is that the US has already departed far from a free market. Whether caused by socialism or cronyism (market manipulation with government help) you get decreased competition and a situation where it’s almost impossible for someone to start up new.
Hence my generic (pun intended) answer to complaints of high price is a de facto “do it better yourself” type answer. If you can’t, maybe you shouldn’t be telling others how to run their business. If you could, were it not for gov, then gov is the problem, not the business. Those that point to the business as the only bad guy and ask for yet more gov control are only going to make it worse.