I think the sentence struck me the most in your excellent article was "Insulin was once almost free."

It was.

My late husband depended on insulin to stay alive. The cost barely impacted our household budget. When he eventually died, it was not because he was rationing insulin, which many Americans do today in response to pharmaceutical conglomerates hiking the price to astronomical levels.

If anything serves to me as a sign of America's decline, insulin prices do. The drug is easy and cheap to manufacture. Only short decades ago, corporations produced it and sold it at a small but fair mark-up. Most people with diabetes could afford it easily, even if they were poor.

Today, according to recent reporting in the New York Times, many middle class Americans can't afford insulin, so they ration it and some of them die.

What does it say about our democracy that we cannot seem to do anything about that? Americans are dying for lack of medicine that's cheap to produce, which outrages nearly all of us — but our democracy is not healthy enough to solve that problem.

What is democracy when it doesn't serve the people? I don't know, but the "demos" in the word doesn't really belong there, does it?