Pharmaceutical giant Eli Lilly announced today that they would be slashing their prices for insulin by 70 percent. Think about that for a moment -- a corporation was pricing a product so high that it can cut the price by 70 percent and still make money off of it. That should be seen as nothing short of obscene to the average person. But what is interesting about this announcement is that it seems a combination of public shame and some competition in the marketplace has brought about this change. And that's worth celebrating a little bit, even if the case isn't exactly cut-and-dried.

Let's start with the good news:

Eli Lilly said it is slashing the prices of commonly prescribed insulin drugs by 70 percent while capping related out-of-pocket costs at $35 a month, a move meant to help address long-standing concerns about the high cost of diabetes care.

In Wednesday's announcement, the company said that it wants to make it easier for patients to afford the lifesaving medication, and CEO David Ricks called on other pharmaceutical companies to follow suit.

"While the current healthcare system provides access to insulin for most people with diabetes, it still does not provide affordable insulin for everyone and that needs to change," Ricks said in a news release.

The company's nonbranded insulin, Insulin Lispro Injection, will drop from $82.41 to $25 per vial, making it the lowest-priced mealtime insulin available, according to the company. Humalog, its most commonly prescribed insulin, will drop 70 percent from its price of $530.40 for a five-pack of insulin pens to roughly $160. Eli Lilly is also launching a new insulin product it calls Rezvoglar, which it says is interchangeable with medication by competitor Sanofi but costs 78 percent less.

As previously mentioned, the company is able to do this because of one reason and one reason alone: because they jacked the price up that high in the first place. The cost of insulin has exploded over the past 15 years or so, as this chart (from 2019) plainly shows. In ten years, the price more than tripled. Reducing the price by 70 percent just brings it back down to where it was before the company's greed became so rampant, to put it another way.

Bernie Sanders was the first politician I ever heard try to draw attention to this particular example of corporate greed. It has been a talking point in his speeches for years, and he tried to get specific legislation passed to change things -- but always unsuccessfully. Bernie did manage to accomplish one very important thing though, and that was to make insulin the "poster child" for prescription drug company greed. Which is pretty easy to do, especially when you compare what Americans have been forced to pay for it compared to the rest of the world. In 2018 the average price an American paid for a vial of insulin was $98.70. The average price an Australian paid was $6.94. No other country was even close -- the highest price any other country in the rest of the word paid was from Chile, and it was still only $21.48. That is clear evidence how the oligopoly on insulin producers just decided to charge all the market would bear in America, with no thought given to the people who actually had to foot their outrageous bill -- people who need insulin to stay alive.

Not that Lilly's C.E.O. actually admitted this -- in that article above he bemoans "the current healthcare system" for not providing "affordable insulin for everyone," as if his own company wasn't a big part of that precise problem. But we shouldn't beat up on him too much, since he has finally seen the light.

President Joe Biden was, of course, challenged by Bernie Sanders in the 2016 Democratic primary. As a result, he had to move in a much more progressive direction than he'd ever been comfortable with previously. And when he introduced his "Build Back Better" proposal to Congress, lo and behold it did include what had become the rallying cry: "$35 a month for insulin, period!" Senators Joe Manchin and Kyrsten Sinema had other ideas, however, so when what was left of the bill passed it only included the $35-a-month guarantee for those on Medicare. People on private health insurance who weren't seniors and people who didn't have health insurance still had to pay through the nose.

So Biden took another crack at it in this year's Sate Of The Union speech, calling for legislation to broaden the $35-per-month insulin price cap to everyone. This probably didn't have much of a chance of passing, with the House in Republican hands, but Biden was throwing a political marker down to indicate that the issue wasn't going to go away politically any time soon.

But public shaming was only one of the pressures Democratic politicians brought to bear on the problem. California's Governor Gavin Newsom announced last year that he was so fed up with the situation that he was going to tackle it directly:

California will start making its own affordable insulin as part of an effort to combat high drug prices for a lifesaving medication that has been made inaccessible for some Americans living with diabetes, Gov. Gavin Newsom (D) announced Thursday.

Newsom said in a video posted to Twitter that $100 million from the state budget he recently signed for 2022-2023 would be allocated for California to "contract and make our own insulin at a cheaper price, close to at cost, and to make it available to all." Half of the $100 million would go toward the development of a "low-cost" insulin, Newsom said. The other $50 million would go toward a facility in the state to manufacture insulin that would "provide new, high-paying jobs and a stronger supply chain for the drug."

"California is going to make its own insulin," Newsom said in the video. "Nothing epitomizes market failures more than the cost of insulin. Many Americans experience out-of-pocket costs anywhere from $300 to $500 per month for this lifesaving drug. California is now taking matters into our own hands."

That was more of a direct challenge to the big pharma companies than just political shaming. Bernie Sanders talking to cheering progressive crowds is one thing, but politicians actually achieving a solid plan to rein in the extortionate corporate greed is quite another. The Big Pharma companies might have been on the brink of losing roughly one-eighth of their U.S. market for insulin (the proportion of California's population to America's). So Eli Lilly decided to essentially throw in the towel, and return the company to making only a very modest profit off the drug rather than so blatantly price-gouging the sick. On this one particular drug. That part's important to remember.

Because this isn't just a problem with insulin. It's just that insulin was the most prominent political example. The same law that Biden signed that started the $35-a-month cap for seniors also will allow Medicare to negotiate over the price of a handful of other outrageously-priced prescription drugs as well. But just a handful, mind you. This is a very small victory in a very large battle, to put it another way. American consumers are being ripped off -- without question, on a daily basis -- by Big Pharma.

Biden took a well-deserved victory lap upon hearing today's news: "Last year, I signed a law to cap insulin at $35 for seniors and I called on pharma companies to bring prices down for everyone on their own. Today, Eli Lilly did that. It's a big deal, and it's time for other manufacturers to follow." He's right to celebrate, because insulin prices returning to a sane and reasonable level is a big accomplishment for Democrats. Sooner or later the other big insulin manufacturers are going to have to follow Lilly's lead. Shaming them and directly challenging them in the marketplace worked in this particular case -- but we've still got a long way to go.

-- Chris Weigant

Follow Chris on Twitter: @ChrisWeigant