This is a complex picture, so there's much more going on here than Big Pharma trying to squeeze out white-knight compounding pharmacies and supplement makers. What we have in the US is an industry that is constantly at the brink of system collapse, because that's the point of maximum efficiency/optimization. Pharma charges whatever payers (insurance companies) will support, and payers pass on whatever consumers can bear before literally becoming insolvent.
Consumers are so alienated that they'll pay out of pocket for a disruptor like Hims, which is doing its best to circumvent the entire system. Sadly, just as there's little government oversight to prevent pharma from becoming monopolistic, there's virtually no regulation on supplements. So you end up with the worst of both worlds; you can either take the $1000 monopoly pill or the $2 gas station pill filled with sawdust and raccoon repellant.
Your comment seems very far from relevant; possibly you posted it in the wrong thread? Either that, or you're stringing words together with no regard for what they mean.
Those complexities may be relevant to other drugs, but not specifically to insulin, which is the case we're discussing here. Nobody needs to recoup their research investment for figuring out how to make insulin cheaply, and insulin prices are extremely far from "the point of maximum efficiency/optimization", which would be where drug companies were charging barely enough to cover the cost of production. Insulin is not regulated as a supplement, it cannot be administered as a pill, it is not sold in gas stations, and no cases of sawdust or raccoon repellent contamination have been reported in insulin.
All that's happening with insulin is that there's an oligopoly that's colluding to extract monopoly profits, which they can do precisely because regulation prevents biology students from hacking together insulin-producing yeasts over the weekend and selling the insulin to whoever is willing to risk it. That same regulation is what prevents Harbor Freight from importing insulin by the case from any of the dozens of other countries where it costs a tenth of what it costs in the US.
https://old.reddit.com/r/AskChina/comments/1j9zf2u/chinese_i... says of China, "I checked and found that rapid-acting insulin is $4 per bottle, long-acting insulin is $10 per bottle, and other brands of insulin cost between $5 and $8." So why does it cost US$100 per bottle in the US? You'd think you could make a big profit importing Chinese insulin, no? But regulations make it difficult to import that insulin from China, so difficult that incumbents can extract US$100 per bottle in monopoly rents.
Consumers are so alienated that they'll pay out of pocket for a disruptor like Hims, which is doing its best to circumvent the entire system. Sadly, just as there's little government oversight to prevent pharma from becoming monopolistic, there's virtually no regulation on supplements. So you end up with the worst of both worlds; you can either take the $1000 monopoly pill or the $2 gas station pill filled with sawdust and raccoon repellant.