More than 1.3 million people are forced to put their lives in danger every day because they can’t afford their life-saving prescriptions. Congress could have fixed that this year, but Republicans in the Senate refused to do it. Repeatedly.
The Annals of Internal Medicine published a study Monday estimating that 16.5% of adults with diabetes delay, skip, ration, and decrease their prescribed doses of insulin because of the cost. Dr. Steffie Woolhandler, a study author and professor at the City University of New York’s Hunter College, explained how dangerous the escalating costs of the drug are to public health. “This is very, very worrisome to doctors,” said Woolhandler. “If people have poorly controlled diabetes … they end up with lots of complications and earlier death.”
Patients in the U.S. pay as much as 10 times more than those in 32 foreign countries in the OECD, according to a 2018 analysis. The average price for a standard unit of insulin, which costs less than $10 to produce was $98.70 in the U.S., $8.81 in those countries. “The fact of the matter is that insulin is far more expensive in the United States than in other countries,” said Dr. Adam Gaffney, a Harvard Medical School pulmonary and critical care physician who is the lead author of the study. “To further compound the problem, we have a particularly fragmented health insurance system.”
Democrats single-handedly passed a price cap on insulin for people on Medicare this summer, fixing as much of the problem as Republicans would allow. A provision of the Inflation Reduction Act caps the cost of insulin for people on Medicare at $35 a month. They used a process to pass that bill that didn’t rely on Republican votes, but that doesn’t mean that Republicans couldn’t join them on the bill.
Not only did Republicans refuse to help pass that bill, they blocked that price cap on insulin from being available to everyone with health insurance. That provision was in the bill, but keeping it there required 60 votes. But 43 Republican senators forced it to be stripped out, including three who are up for reelection this year—Marco Rubio of Florida, Ron Johnson of Wisconsin, and Tim Scott of South Carolina.
Those three could have saved the day. There were seven Republicans who decided that they weren’t cruel enough to want diabetics’ premature deaths on their heads and voted with Democrats. If the three of them gave a damn about the lives of actually birthed people, rather than restricting their “pro-life” actions to fetuses, more people could afford to live.
Democrats—singlehandedly—will have helped the 11% of diabetics on Medicare who reported they have had to ration their insulin. The more than 20% of younger adults with diabetes who reported they skimp on their use of insulin. That’s one-fifth of people in America with diabetes who are risking their lives because they can’t afford a drug that would cost them less than $10 if they lived in a civilized nation.
Rubio and Scott didn’t really bother to defend their votes. Johnson claimed he did it because Democrats were doing it the wrong way.
He’s not against people affording insulin, he’s against Democrats using a legislative process they all agreed to allow to do it.
Sen. Raphael Warnock (D-GA) is one of the leaders in the Senate trying to make insulin affordable for everyone. Here’s what his opponent—who actually could become a U.S. Senator—said about the issue in their only debate: “I believe in reducing insulin but at the same time, you gotta eat right. I know many people that’s on insulin. Unless you’re eating right, insulin is doing you no good. So you have to get food prices down and you gotta get gas down so you can go get insulin.”
I’ll just leave that there.
Given majorities in Congress next year, Democrats will take up the issue again, and this time could prevail if the Senate majority is big enough to kick Joe Manchin and Kyrsten Sinema to the curb and get rid of the legislative filibuster. But that means a Democratic majority. It means a serious upgrade in Wisconsin and the end of Ron Johnson’s political life. It means keeping Herschel Walker the hell out of the place.
If we can hold on to all of our current seats and win two more, then Manchin and Sinema will no longer be able to block filibuster reform and everything that follows from it, from expanding voting rights to providing paid family leave to making insulin affordable for everyone who needs it. Please help make that happen.
On Daily Kos’ The Brief we talk about the work being done to keep Nevada’s Senate Democratic. We are joined by UNITE HERE director Mario Yedidia. UNITE HERE represents more than 250,000 workers throughout the U.S. and Canada who work in the hospitality, gaming, food service, manufacturing, textile, laundry, and airport industries. Yedidia tells us about what workers in Nevada are thinking about and voting about this coming November.
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