You could visit India once (about $1000 for a round-trip) and have your prescriptions shipped to you for an year. The cost saving appears obvious. The legality of it is a gray area, and in the case of insulin the cold chain is critical to maintain, as **panache45 **pointed out.
The surreal thing about the U.S. healthcare system is that, shipping logistics and legal considerations aside, the economics of flying to India to secure an insulin supply could easily make sense.
Refrigerated and frozen medications are packed (or should be, anyway) with an indicator that changes color if the package gets too warm.
I would only use it for a historical figure or jokingly for someone who is clearly not. That is, someone in their 20s who is complaining about kids these days.
That’s just the airfare. Very few people live at the airport; you need to include costs for getting there and back. You also need to include costs for lodging in India. And then there may well be further costs to pay someone for taking care of your dog/children/grandmother while you’re gone – if, that is, you can even find anybody suitable to do so. And the costs of lost income, if you don’t have paid vacation time available, which a lot of people – especially sick people – either never had or have already used up. And, quite possibly, the little cost of losing one’s job because one wasn’t available for work.
Plus which, there are actually quite a lot of people who can’t come up with $1000 all at once.
I assumed that mandala was highlighting this more to indict the U.S. healthcare system than to propose it as a serious solution to the problem.