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Cover Letter
The question driving my research for this project concerns the exorbitant price of insulin in America, why it’s serious, and the power we have as citizens to lobby against it. In layman’s terms: “Why are insulin prices so high in the United States, and what can be done to lower them?”The answers to these questions are not as simple as they seem. It isn’t just a matter of supply-and-demand, or other simple concepts commonly taught in high school Economics 101 classes. The factors are multitudinous and lack easy solutions, with corporate monopolies, class division, and political unrest all playing significant roles.
It’s bad enough that prescription medications are largely inaccessible to those who cannot afford insurance. In particular though, this is a problem that jeopardizes real human lives. Tens of millions of Americans suffer from diabetes types 1 and 2, and a diabetic person risks death if they can’t access the insulin they need. Last year, diabetes killed nearly 100,000 Americans. The issue is dire on all possible levels and desperately needs fixing.
This should be uncontroversial. Most can agree that it’s bad to endanger and cause vast amounts of suffering in millions of lives. However, most are also not billionaire industry titans. The interests of the people contradict that of the rich few with the power to stop it.
That said, my project seeks to highlight what is possible. What we, as cogs in a broken machine, can do to fight for affordable insulin and be there for each other in the meantime.
I was both lucky and unlucky to have such a wealth of sources at my fingertips on this topic. On one hand, there was no shortage of information to work with. On the other, not all of that information was necessarily in good faith, credible, or true. I did my best to trim the fat, but it proved a big challenge for one person.
I am targeting working-class, non-diabetic Americans of voting age for a couple reasons. For one, there is a great lot of us and we are powerful as a mobilized group. Secondly, diabetic individuals don't need things they already know re-explained to them in a juvenile manner and are likely already aware of the urgency of this issue, so my language focuses on educating those without it.
I have chosen the genre of a website because it’s an easily accessible format for most of my target audience, and complex issues like this are easily condensed and navigated across multiple pages.