07/07/2026
Editors Note: type two diabetes can be 'cured' in many ways, and has been cured by many for a long time. It's just not profitable to do so. | Chinese scientists just did something pretty incredible — they actually cured someone’s type 2 diabetes. Like, actually cured it. Not managed it, not controlled it. Cured.
The patient got a cell transplant back in July 2021 at Shanghai Changzheng Hospital. And get this — within eleven weeks, no more insulin injections. Then over the next year? They slowly stopped taking their oral meds too. Just… stopped needing them.
Dr. Yin Hao, one of the researchers leading this thing, said follow-up exams showed the patient’s pancreatic islet function was “effectively restored.” The patient hasn’t needed insulin for 33 months now. Thirty-three months.
So what did they actually do?
They grew copies of the patient’s own insulin-producing cells in a lab, then transplanted them back into the body. Essentially gave the pancreas its function back. The body just started regulating blood sugar on its own again, the way it’s supposed to.
Timothy Kieffer, a professor at the University of British Columbia, called it “an important advance in the field of cell therapy for diabetes.” Which, yeah. Understatement of the year, maybe.
Why This Matters
Diabetes is brutal. Your body can’t convert food into energy properly, and if you don’t manage it, things get really bad really fast. The usual treatment? Insulin shots and pills. Every day. For life. It’s expensive, it’s exhausting, and it never ends.
Dr. Yin seems pretty confident about where this is headed: “Our technology has matured and it has pushed boundaries in the field of regenerative medicine for the treatment of diabetes.”
China has 140 million people with diabetes, according to the International Diabetes Federation. That’s the highest number in the world. Forty million of them need insulin injections for the rest of their lives. Or at least, they did before this breakthrough.
The American Insulin Crisis: Profit Over Lives
Here’s where it gets uncomfortable. And honestly? Infuriating.
The American healthcare system has turned diabetes into a massive profit center. And this Chinese breakthrough threatens to blow the whole thing up.
Three companies basically run the global insulin game: Novo Nordisk, Sanofi, and Eli Lilly. That last one? American. And they’ve been making obscene amounts of money off people who literally need their product to survive.
The global insulin market is currently valued at somewhere between $28–34 billion annually, with projections to reach over $40 billion by the 2030s. These three companies control over 90% of that market.
The Price Gouging Scandal
Here’s what’s been happening in the US for years now: insulin prices have skyrocketed. We’re talking about a medication that’s been around for a century, that costs a few dollars to manufacture, being sold for hundreds of dollars per vial.
Insulin prices increased between 600% and 1,500% over the past 20 years. Let that sink in. Six hundred to fifteen hundred percent.
People are rationing insulin. Dying because they can’t afford it. Crossing borders into Canada or Mexico to buy the same exact insulin at a fraction of the price. There are diabetics who have to choose between insulin and rent. Between insulin and food.
The numbers are devastating. 1.3 million Americans reported rationing insulin in 2021 alone. One in four diabetes patients have reported rationing their medication because of cost.
And the consequences? They’re deadly.
Alec Raeshawn Smith was 26 when he died in 2017, less than one month after aging off his mother’s insurance. He was paying $1,300 a month for insulin and supplies — almost half his salary. He tried to ration. He died from diabetic ketoacidosis.
Jesimya David Scherer, 21, worked two jobs. He died in 2019 while rationing insulin, unable to afford his prescriptions until the next payday.
In 2018, mothers whose children died from insulin rationing showed up at Sanofi’s offices in Cambridge, MA carrying their children’s ashes.
Their children’s ashes.
The profit motive has created an actual moral atrocity. These companies didn’t invent insulin — that was discovered in 1921 by researchers who sold the patent for $1 because they believed everyone should have access to it. But these companies own the patents on the modern formulations and the manufacturing, and they’ve decided that maximizing shareholder value is more important than human lives.
The Political Theater
After years of public outrage, Congressional hearings, and mounting pressure, all three major manufacturers announced price cuts in March 2023.
But here’s the thing — this only happened after Bernie Sanders dragged the CEOs before the Senate and the public shaming became unbearable. The Inflation Reduction Act capped insulin costs for Medicare patients at $35, but left millions of younger Americans and those with private insurance still struggling.
When Senator Sanders asked the three CEOs to commit to never raising insulin prices again, only one — Eli Lilly’s CEO — agreed, and even then only for existing products.
Meanwhile, lawsuits have been piling up. Class actions. State attorneys general. The University of Pennsylvania. Maine General Medical Center. Multiple institutions accusing these companies of price-fixing, deceptive pricing practices, and putting profits over patients.
Minnesota’s Attorney General secured settlements with all three companies in 2024–2025, guaranteeing that Minnesotans can buy insulin for $35 per month. But only Minnesotans. Everyone else? Still at the mercy of the market.
What Happens When the Cure Arrives?
If this Chinese cell therapy works at scale — and that’s still a big if — it’s going to absolutely wreck the insulin market.
But here’s the dark part. When demand for insulin drops, these companies aren’t just going to accept lower profits and move on. They have shareholders to answer to. Quarterly earnings reports. Executive bonuses tied to revenue.
So what do they do?
Scenario One: Scorched Earth Pricing
If you’ve got fewer customers but still want the same revenue, you charge the remaining customers more. Way more. The people who can’t access the cure or for whom it doesn’t work? They’ll be held hostage even worse than they already are.
It’s economic logic stripped of any human decency. And in a system where the only legal obligation is to maximize profit for shareholders, it’s not just possible — it’s likely.
Scenario Two: Market Exit
If curing diabetes becomes widespread enough, manufacturing insulin might not be profitable anymore. And in a system driven purely by profit, unprofitable means gone. Just… gone.
What happens to the people who still need it then? Who makes it? Who ensures quality? Who keeps prices reasonable when there’s no competition left?
The Fundamental Problem
This is what happens when you let life-saving medication be controlled by corporations whose only legal obligation is to maximize profit for shareholders. It’s not a bug in the system — it’s the system working exactly as designed.
The fact that a cure for diabetes might actually make things worse for some patients in the short term tells you everything you need to know about how broken this is.
Dr. Kasia Lipska at Yale testified before Congress about a patient in her mid-20s with Type 1 diabetes who “deliberately let her sugars run high so she could be admitted to the hospital and get free samples of insulin upon discharge.”
“It was a risky plan — she could have died,” Lipska said. “But that’s how desperate she was.”
People shouldn’t have to hope that Chinese scientists cure diabetes just so American companies can’t keep price gouging them. But here we are.
Despite all of this ugliness, the breakthrough itself is incredible. This could transform millions of lives in China alone. The healthcare burden there is enormous, and this therapy might actually lighten it.
Obviously, more research is needed. More clinical trials. Larger studies. We’re not at the finish line yet.
But still. After all this time dealing with diabetes as this permanent, life-altering condition — there’s finally something that looks like an actual cure.
Maybe it’ll force the US healthcare system to finally confront the fact that profit and medicine make terrible bedfellows. Or maybe it won’t.
Either way, for the first time in a long time, there’s real hope. And that matters.
A Note on “Communist China” and What This Really Means
Look, I know China isn’t communist in the pure ideological sense. The Chinese Communist Party presides over what’s essentially state capitalism — a mixed economy with heavy state intervention and private enterprise operating under party oversight. It’s complicated, messy, and doesn’t fit neatly into the boxes we learned about in high school civics class.
But here’s why this matters anyway.
When the headline reads “Communist China Cures Diabetes While Capitalist America Lets People Die Rationing Insulin,” a lot of centrists and liberals are going to have a knee-jerk reaction. They’re going to want to explain away the contradiction, to defend the American system, to point out that China isn’t really communist so the comparison isn’t fair.
And they’re missing the point entirely.
Socialism — actual socialism — isn’t a light switch. You don’t flip it on and suddenly everything is publicly owned and centrally planned. It’s a protected process. A transition. A gradual restructuring of economic priorities away from pure profit maximization and toward meeting human needs.
China’s healthcare achievements don’t come from being ideologically pure. They come from having a system where the state can direct resources toward public health research without being held hostage by pharmaceutical shareholders demanding quarterly growth. Where scientists can focus on curing diseases instead of creating profitable dependency.
The wake-up call isn’t “communism good, capitalism bad.” It’s simpler and more damning than that: When your economic system makes curing a disease bad for business, something is fundamentally broken. When the profit motive means people die rationing $5 worth of insulin sold for $300, you don’t have a functioning healthcare system — you have a protection racket with a Hippocratic Oath.
China didn’t cure diabetes because of Marx or Mao. They did it because their system allowed them to prioritize the research. Meanwhile, America’s system actively incentivizes not curing chronic diseases, because treatment is so much more profitable than cures.
That’s the real story here. Not ideology. Incentives.
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By HR News, see comments for sources and more.
