The Same Week Eli Lilly Lost $15 Billion from One Tweet, I Nearly Flew to Paris to Buy Drugs

The price of drugs in America has become our national punchline and shame. But this week--hallelujah!--the price of one drug that treats the symptoms of menopause has just gone generic.

Paris, 2015 © Deborah Copaken

Unless you’ve been living under a wifi-free rock, you’ve probably heard about the Elon Musk blue check fiasco, which I have no interest in expounding upon here, but if you’re unsure of what I’m referring to and interested, Vox did a good explainer here. Anyhoo, one of the results of Musk’s misstep was this nine-word tweet by a parody twitter account which, for the price of an $8 blue check, lost Eli Lilly a purported $15 billion.

If you’re like me, first you gasped, then you laughed, then you cheered this brilliant act of defiance and resistance. Nine words! $8! To bring down a pharmaceutical company that is literally stealing money from people with diabetes. Last year, Lilly’s CEO, David Ricks, made $21.5 million. Meanwhile, that same year, 100,000 Americans died from diabetes: a disease that is eminently treatable with access to affordable insulin. (My own first cousin, Jeremy Copaken, died in 2014 of insulin shock, just after his 39th birthday.)

While Eli Lilly was losing its billions, I got some bad financial news of my own. The copays of two of the drugs I count on to function in my daily life—Aimovig (for migraines) and Divigel (for symptoms of menopause)—had gone up exponentially. Aimovig had gone from a copay of $80 a month to a whopping $668 a month. Divigel had gone from a copay of $35 a month to $144 a month.

Recalling that when I lived in Paris from 1988-92, my birth control pills cost 5 francs a month (approximately $1 a month) versus the $30 copay I’d been paying in the U.S., I immediately went online and checked the price of a ticket to Paris: $607 round trip. Meaning, for less than the cost of one month of Aimovig, I could fly to Paris, stay with my friend who lives there, and buy a year’s supply of sustaining drugs for a fraction of their cost in America.

So I texted my Parisian friend and asked her to please find out how much a month’s worth of Divigel or its estradiol equivalent would cost in Paris.

The answer astounded me.

Divigel sachets © Deborah Copaken