The crescendo of outrage at the health care system lately has some arguably valid complaints. Take insulin for example. Affordable insulin is so hard to come by in the U.S. that people turn to underground networks of shared medicines, ration their own supply to cut costs, or sometimes cross the border to Mexico or Canada to get the medication they need. 

Pharmaceutical companies recently introduced price caps on insulin after coming under scrutiny for charging hundreds of dollars per vial, which could be purchased in Canada for roughly one-tenth the price. About 8 million people in the U.S. with diabetes rely on insulin, and its high prices have become emblematic of what many see as a broken health care system.

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“Among diabetics, there is quite a lot of desperation, and there’s quite a lot of people facing really serious health consequences and often even death because of the fairly arbitrary and often deeply flawed ways that the system that provides us with the medicine we need to survive fails,” said Anthony Di Franco, a Type 1 diabetic and computer scientist.

Insulin is one of many inaccessible medications in this system, with Americans paying three-fold the price for drugs as comparable countries in 2022. Desperate for relief, people with conditions like long COVID also turn to online drug markets because clinical trials testing therapies to treat it have been slow. People with rare diseases often don’t have access to therapies that could help because there is little financial incentive for pharmaceutical companies to invest in trials to test them. And some patients with fatal conditions who do have treatments approved still can’t access them through insurance because of complications in the current regulatory structure.

"This is, fundamentally, a response to a system that is perceived to be not working."

Fed up with the U.S. health care system, many so-called biohackers are trying to increase access to therapies by providing people with DIY instructions to make them from the comfort of their own home. Biohacking covers a range of activities, from performing gene-editing in garages to synthesizing the ingredients of certain medicines or technologies and publishing DIY instructions on how to make them at home to reverse engineering vaccines.

The emergence of biohacking in itself shows that........

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