About DAN

Diabetes Aid Now (DAN) is an online mutual aid network that was formed in 2025 to address the ongoing healthcare crisis in the United States. It costs over $22,000 annually to treat one diabetic patient in the US.

While there have been some modest cost interventions by the insulin and GLP-1 manufacturers, in the form of coupons and direct-to-consumer pharmacies, many diabetics still struggle to cover the cost of managing this complex and always changing disease.

To make matters worse, according to the Center on Budget and Policy Priorities, “Roughly 15 million people will lose health coverage and become uninsured by 2034” under the Trump administration’s plans.

To help combat this artificial scarcity, DAN connects diabetics in need of medication and supplies with those who have extra to share.

Group Ethos

Access to healthcare is a human right

→ The simplest way to meet this human right is to provide free universal healthcare

Community is life-sustaining

→ The diabetics behind DAN are adding a group to the mutual aid ecosystem that seeks to get more of us directly involved in the process of helping people survive

→ This is why DAN doesn’t take donations, but instead facilitates supply and resource sharing between diabetics 

Agency and autonomy are paramount when helping each other

→ Each person is an expert on their own treatment, disease management, and life

→ True leadership is an act of service not control

→ Clarity is kindness

Helping diabetics in the US requires an intersectional approach

→ Ableist misconceptions about diabetes thrive within white supremacist systems

→ The medical system has taught many of us that there is a hierarchy of diabetes with type 1s at the top, type 2s blamed for what is mostly a genetic disease, everyone else frequently forgotten, and anyone labeled “non-compliant” at the bottom

→ Anti-Blackness and anti-Indigenous racism, anti-fatness, and classism inform the structure of this hierarchy, which routinely harms diabetics of color, trans diabetics, and diabetics who have co-occuring disabilities

→ At DAN we aim to work horizontally with all types of diabetics (including: Gestational, Neonatal, Wolfram Syndrome, Alström Syndrome, Steroid-Induced, Type 1, Type 1.5 aka Latent Autoimmune Diabetes in Adults, Type 2, Type 3c, Type 5, Cystic Fibrosis-Related Diabetes, Maturity-Onset Diabetes of the Young, and any added to the list as researchers learn more about this complex disease)

We don’t use generative AI

→ This website was researched, written, illustrated, and edited by humans, not AI

→ When you get a text or email from DAN, it was written by a human

→ DAN and our volunteers will not use generative AI in any of our media or our communications with you