Letter to the editor: Diabetic Maine child is being priced out of his own life

My 7-year-old son Dakota lives with Type 1 diabetes and uses Humalog, the insulin produced by Eli Lilly. In America, 193,000 young people live with diabetes. Ask these kids’ parents, and they’ll tell you heartbreaking stories about working multiple jobs to pay for insulin, or rationing insulin because it’s too expensive – sometimes fatally.

I’ll never forget the night my son’s life rested in a pharmacy clerk’s hands.

Dakota was 3 years old and had been visiting family three hours away; his insulin was accidentally left there. When I realized, I frantically called my friend, who drove over to the pharmacy – only to find out that another dose of insulin would cost over $200.

We don’t have that kind of money; fortunately, the clerk let Dakota have the insulin, free of charge.

These are the impossible struggles Big Pharma passes on to working-class Americans.

Power brokers like former Eli Lilly executive and current Health and Human Services Secretary Alex Azar and Sen. Susan Collins – who consistently sides with Big Pharma over constituents in exchange for campaign cash – care more about profiting off of families like mine than they do about having the blood of children like Dakota on their hands.

Hundreds of thousands of parents are being priced out of decisions about our children’s lives because drug companies like Eli Lilly and people like Susan Collins force us to.

We need affordable insulin – now.

Sabrina Burbeck

Old Town