Missouri Sen. Josh Hawley doesn’t agree with President Joe Biden very often. When it happens, we take notice.
Well, it happened Tuesday night at the State of the Union address.
Amid all the tiresome, partisan theatrics — Democrats leaping to their feet to applaud the president’s proposals, Republicans sitting on their hands or even heckling — Hawley stood out by standing up.
He was one of the few Republicans to rise and clap when Biden proposed capping insulin costs at $35 for every diabetic man, woman and child in America.
“Every day, millions need insulin to control their diabetes so they can stay alive,” the president said. Older Americans on Medicare already have their insulin costs capped at $35 a month — an effort that should be extended to the rest of the country, Biden said: “Let’s finish the job this time.”
Hawley agreed. Of course he did.
Biden’s proposal came just a few days after the senator introduced his own bill to cap insulin costs.
Now Hawley and Biden just have to get Congress on board.
Why cap the cost of insulin? Because affordability has become an emergency for the 1-in-10 Americans with diabetes. The American Diabetes Association reports that the average cost of insulin nearly tripled between 2002 and 2013, and that the price of the four most popular types of insulin had tripled again by 2019. For people with little or no health insurance, then, that can mean monthly out-of-pocket costs of $1,000 or more.
The result: About a quarter of insulin users report they have cut back or even skipped doses in order to save money. That puts their lives and health at risk.
Not everybody agrees what to do about the problem. Many of Hawley’s fellow Republicans oppose price caps on insulin, saying it would discourage drug companies from making investments in innovation that have produced better delivery systems and better medicines to help diabetics. A 2018 study by the American Diabetes Association recommended streamlining the country’s regulatory system and bringing more transparency to the haggling between drug companies and pharmacy benefit managers — the nation’s troublesome, underscrutinized system of middlemen that negotiate prices for all drugs. California is even trying a novel approach: The Golden State is going to produce its own insulin.
We’ll see how that turns out. For now, insulin costs remain a problem in need of a solution.
Twenty states already have some form of cap on insulin costs. That doesn’t include Kansas or Missouri, though there have been proposals in both state legislatures. And at the federal level, Senate Democrats tried and failed last year to put a $35 monthly cap on the medication. The proposal fell by the wayside during the contentious negotiations over what eventually became the Inflation Reduction Act. Hawley, to his credit, was one of just seven Republicans who voted for the cap.
His new bill would in some ways go further than Biden’s proposal. It would limit out-of-pocket insulin costs to $25 a month through private insurance and Medicare. But the biggest difference isn’t between Hawley and Biden — it’s between them and the rest of a divided Congress.
Lowering the cost of insulin “is a very potent talking point, but not something that’s likely to result in actual legislation anytime soon,” the Kaiser Family Foundation’s Larry Levitt told Reuters.
