Taking Action to Make Insulins Affordable

Insulin affordability can be a life or death issue for people living with diabetes, and Sanofi is committed to helping patients get the medicines they need at a price they can afford. Stories about patients needing to ration their insulin due to high costs are heartbreaking and unacceptable.

We took action. First, we continued to help patients with commercial insurance have access at the very best price by offering ever-increasing rebates to health plans to cover the medicines patients need. In fact, the cost of our insulins to insurance companies has decreased by 25 percent since 2012. Second, we built a patient assistance program for serving low-income patients without coverage for Sanofi insulins, providing free insulin to over 66,000 patients in 2018.

But that’s not enough.

Sanofi has worked over the past year to build a unique program that ensures that patients exposed to high out-of-pocket costs at the pharmacy counter can get access to insulin at a price they can afford. Last year, we introduced our Insulins Valyou Savings Program, which made a vial of our insulins available for $99. That’s 60 percent below the list price and substantially below any insulin in the United States, even the price of generic or follow-on insulins.

But we heard from patients and health care providers: $99 per vial was not low enough for some patients, especially those who use more than one vial a month or require both short-acting and long-acting insulins. So today, we’re updating the Valyou program to allow patients access to one or more Sanofi insulins for one set price of $99 a month.

This program will not work for everyone. For patients with commercial insurance, insulin will still be cheapest paired with Sanofi’s co-pay programs. For those covered under Medicare, Medicaid, or similar federal or state programs where pharmaceutical companies cannot offer this type of assistance, we support changing rules to expand this access program to all those who might benefit. For low-income patients, the new program may still be out of reach, but they may qualify for the patient assistance program under Sanofi Patient Connection to receive free medication.

Our mission is to make sure that not a single patient falls through the cracks, and we are working harder than ever to connect with the patients who are most impacted by changes to our health care system. If anyone has trouble accessing Sanofi insulin for any reason, we want to hear from them at www.teamingupfordiabetes.com or 1-888-VISITSPC. If we can enroll them in one of our existing programs, we will. And if we find there is a hole in this safety net we are creating, we will close it.

Patients deserve nothing less.