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.
