WASHINGTON – Rarely a day goes by without President Joe Biden mentioning insulin prices.
He promotes a $35 drug price cap for Americans on Medicare — in White House speeches, campaigns and even at non-healthcare events across the country. His reelection team flooded swing state airwaves with ads mentioning him, in English and Spanish.
All of this would apparently result in a far-reaching political and economic impact. The reality is more complicated.
As his campaign tries to emphasize what it sees as an advantage over presumptive Republican nominee Donald Trump, Biden often exaggerates what people eligible for the price cap paid for insulin. It is also unclear whether the number of Americans helped will be enough to help influence the November elections, even in the most contested states, which could reach a few thousand votes.
“This is much more about political signaling in a campaign than it is about showing people that they benefit from the insulin limit,” said Drew Altman, president and CEO of KFF, a nonprofit that researches health issues. “It’s a way to flesh out the fact that you are a candidate for health care.”
Many of those benefiting from the price cap were already receiving reduced-price insulin, were already Biden supporters, or both. Others who need reduced-price insulin, however, cannot get it because they do not have Medicare or private health insurance.
Biden’s campaign emphasizes the president’s successful efforts to lower insulin prices and contrasts that with Trump, who first ran for president promising to lower drug prices but took limited action in office.
“It’s a powerful and tangible contrast,” said Biden campaign spokesman Charles Lutvak. “And it’s a campaign we’ve been campaigning on from the beginning, aggressively and across our coalition.”
Approximately 8.4 million people in the United States control their blood sugar levels with insulin and more than 1 million have type 1 diabetes and may die without regular access to it. The White House says nearly 4 million seniors qualify for the new lower price.
The price cap for Medicare beneficiaries was part of the Reducing Inflation Act, which originally intended to limit insulin to $35 for all those with health insurance. When it passed in 2022, it was narrowed by congressional Republicans to apply only to older adults.
The Biden administration also announced agreements with drugmakers Sanofi, Novo Nordisk and Eli Lilly to cap insulin co-pays at $35 for those with private insurance. They represent more than 90% of the US insulin market.
But Biden constantly says that many people used to pay up to $400 a month, which is an exaggeration. A Department of Health and Human Services study released in December 2022 found that people with diabetes who were enrolled in Medicare or had private insurance paid an average of $452 annually, not monthly.
The high prices cited by the president mainly affected people without health insurance. But uninsured rates have fallen to historic lows due to the health care law signed by the Obama administration and aggressive efforts by the Biden White House to ensure that those eligible to sign up do so more often.
So, in effect, one of the administration’s policy initiatives is undermining the economic argument of another.
This effort did not reach everyone, however.
Yanet Martinez, who lives in Phoenix and supports Biden. She doesn’t work or have health insurance, but she gets insulin for about $16 a month, thanks to deep discounts at her local clinic.
The lower prices only apply if the husband, a landscaper, does not earn enough to exceed the monthly income limit. If he does, her insulin could jump to more than $500, she said.
“I heard people talk about the price of insulin falling. I didn’t see that,” Martinez, 42, said. “It should be uniform. There are a lot of people who can’t pay and that makes things very difficult.”
Sen. Raphael Warnock, D-Ga., is sponsoring bipartisan legislation to make the $35 insulin limit universal, even for people without health insurance. Meanwhile, he said, what has been accomplished with Medicare beneficiaries and drug manufacturers agreeing to lower their prices is “literally saving lives and saving people money.”
“This is good policy because it centers people and not politics,” Warnock said. He said that as he travels through Georgia, a crucial swing state in November, people say “thank you for doing this for me, or for someone in my family.”
That includes people like Tommy Marshall, a 56-year-old financial services consultant from Atlanta who has health insurance. He was diagnosed with type 1 diabetes at age 45 and injects fast-acting insulin several times a day. He paid about $250 for four to eight weeks’ worth of medication last November, but saw the price drop by half in February after Novo Nordisk agreed to cut prices.
“If I were his political consultant, I would be telling (Biden) to talk about this constantly,” said Marshall, a longtime Democrat and longtime public advocate for lowering insulin prices, including with the advocacy group Protect Our Care Georgia.
Marshall said the price caps “have significant emotional resonance” and could influence a close election, but also admitted: “We are talking about people between the ages of 18 and 65. I can imagine there are probably two or three other issues that are ahead of this one.”
“Maybe someone is on the fence,” he added, “that might influence them.”
Geoff Garin, a pollster for Biden’s re-election campaign, said the insulin limit is one of the president’s top-performing issues. He said the data was “clear, consistent and overwhelming.”
Rich Fiesta, executive director of the Alliance for Retired Americans, which supported Biden, called the insulin limit an important issue for the president among older voters.
“For those who can be persuaded – and there are still some out there, believe it or not – drug costs are a very important factor,” said Fiesta, whose group has 4.4 million members and advocates for health and safety economical for the elderly.
The Trump campaign did not respond to questions. But Theo Merkel, a senior researcher at the conservative Paragon Health Institute, countered that the insulin price cut is an example of “policies written to suit talking points, not the other way around.”
Merkel, who served as Trump’s White House adviser on health policy, said insulin manufacturers have long preferred caps on how much policyholders pay because it gives them more leverage to secure higher prices from insurance companies. .
The president’s approval ratings on health care are among the highest on a range of issues, yet only 42% of U.S. adults approve of Biden’s handling of health care, while 55% disapprove , according to a February poll from the Associated Press and the NORC Center. for Public Affairs Research.
KFF found in its own poll in December that 59% of U.S. adults trust the Democratic Party to do a better job of addressing health care affordability issues, compared to 39% of Republicans, even if only 26% of respondents in the same survey said they knew about the insulin price limit.
“In political terms, the Democrats and Biden have an advantage on health care,” Altman said.
This story originally appeared on ABCNews.go.com read the full story
