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A bipartisan group of senators has reached a deal on capping the price of insulin at $35, a huge breakthrough after years of haggling behind the scenes on legislation to reduce the costs of living with diabetes, Sen. Jeanne Shaheen told Semafor.
The New Hampshire Democrat is making an urgent push to pass legislation to reduce the cost of insulin before her retirement from Congress, teaming with Sens. Susan Collins, R-Maine, Raphael Warnock, D-Ga., and John Kennedy, R-La. They were policy rivals not that long ago: Shaheen and Collins once squared off with Warnock and Kennedy over competing proposals and struggled to reconcile their differences.
But now they have. And Shaheen hopes her last nine months in the Senate can yield a significant new law.
“I would really like to be able to leave the Senate thinking that we had helped to address insulin costs for a lot of Americans,” she said in an interview. “This is the most expensive chronic disease.”
There’s a lot of bad blood in the Senate these days, but there’s reason to believe the quartet can break through. They have additional co-sponsors lined up to back the legislation in the coming days, a Democratic aide said, and hope to build momentum for the new bill to be attached to other must-pass legislation, such as a tax extenders bill at the end of the year.
But first the group has to convince Senate Majority Leader John Thune that the bill can pass, and then they’ll need President Donald Trump to buy in.
“This is something that he should support. Because it is ‘affordability.’ It’s an issue that affects millions of Americans, and even more when you add in all of the people affected by the disease,” Shaheen said. “You’ve got to be able to compromise.”
Collins and Shaheen focused their previous proposal on allowing people with private and employer-based health insurance to buy a month’s supply of insulin at $35 or less. Kennedy and Warnock wanted to expand the $35 cap to include people without health insurance. The Congressional Budget Office said that would be “very expensive,” Shaheen said.
So they forged a compromise: a pilot program in 10 states that would allow the uninsured to buy insulin at the lower price. The Health and Human Services Department would select those states based on numbers of newly diagnosed people with diabetes who lack insurance.
The group’s bill also changes pharmacy benefit manager rebate programs to save money. Kennedy, a fiscal conservative, wants to pay for its costs, though that detail will need to be worked out with other senators.
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Shaheen and Collins were on the doorstep of passing their legislation in 2022. Then came the party-line Inflation Reduction Act, which capped insulin for Medicare recipients at $35 but also included clean energy funding and tax changes that Republicans hated.
“The Republicans got pissed, to be honest. They got really angry. And so the idea that they were going to move forward on this bipartisan bill went down the tubes,” Shaheen said. “It’s been challenging to get it back on the table.”
But the New Englanders have some shared muscle memory. Collins has worked on insulin for years — and even is receiving air support in her reelection race highlighting her work on the issue. Shaheen quickly joined her cause after getting elected to Congress; the issue is very personal to her, with a diabetic granddaughter.
Warnock and Kennedy hail from states with high rates of diabetes. And Kennedy speaks often to Trump.
“There is a real interest in this issue,” Shaheen said. “I think we’re going to get there.”
Warnock said the compromise “provides a pathway of funding to community health centers, so they can continue reaching uninsured people who need affordable insulin.” Kennedy addressed affordability in his endorsement, saying that “for a whole lot of families in Louisiana, one of the biggest worries is how they’re going to pay for life-saving medication like insulin.”
“I have heard far too many stories from people in Maine and across the country who have been forced to ration their insulin because of the cost, and that is simply unacceptable,” Collins said.
Burgess’s view
Bipartisan breakthroughs are few and far between these days, but I wouldn’t take this one totally off the table in an election year. Republicans will be looking to help Collins in an election year, Shaheen is making a big legacy play in her last year in office, Warnock is a rising Democratic star, and Kennedy brings some heft from the right to the table.
That said, the last time I wrote about this was three years ago — a very long time in politics. Now that there’s a deal, the foursome need to accelerate their campaign quickly or risk stalling out ahead of the midterms, or after.
Notable
- Insulin costs dropped for Medicare users under the Biden-era caps, per HealthDay News.