Insulin is cheap but diabetes is enormously expensive. Nytimes has an excellent series of articles http://query.nytimes.com/gst/fullpage.html?res=9907e2da1f30f...

The articles describe diabetes patients as floating "shipwrecks": a rudder broken here, a sail there, no one at the helm. It's a good analogy because, when you have diabetes, almost anything can fail without warning.