Eli Lilly caps monthly costs for insulin at $35

Eli Lilly & Co. is capping out-of-pocket costs for insulin at $35 a month, following a public plea from President Joe Biden for lower prices of the diabetes treatment for all Americans.

Lilly announced the cap Wednesday along with other actions, including cutting the list price for non-branded Insulin Lispro Injection to $25 a vial in May, while some Humalog and Humulin doses will be slashed 70% in the fourth quarter. Newly launched Rezvoglar will sell at a 78% discount to a biosimilar version — Sanofi's Lantus — starting in April, the company said.

The drugmaker is heeding Biden's call just as it's lobbying for a bill to allow obesity drugs to be covered by Medicare, including its popular Mounjaro diabetes treatment, which is under review for weight loss. In his State of the Union address last month, Biden said he'd seek to expand the Inflation Reduction Act's $35 cap on insulin costs for seniors on Medicare to all patients. His administration has made lowering the cost of insulin a priority, but his proposal faces an uphill battle in a divided Congress. California's Julie Su nominated as next U.S. labor secretary

President Joe Biden is nominating Julie Su, the current deputy secretary and former California official, as his next labor secretary, replacing the departing incumbent, former Boston Mayor Marty Walsh.

Su, a civil rights attorney and former head of California's labor department, was central to negotiations between labor and freight rail companies late last year, working to avert an economically debilitating strike.

If confirmed by the Senate, Su would also be the first Asian American in the Biden administration to serve in the Cabinet at the secretary level.

She also would expand the majority of women serving in the president's Cabinet. She was confirmed by the Senate to her current role in 2021 by a 50–47 vote.

Notably, she was California's labor chief during the pandemic when the beleaguered Employment Development Department lost billions of dollars to fraud.

She publicly acknowledged that EDD, one of the departments she oversaw, failed to stop rampant fraud in the distribution of pandemic-related unemployment insurance benefits.

“There is no sugarcoating the reality,” Su said in January 2021. “California did not have enough security measures in place.”

Tesla plans to build plant in northern Mexico

Mexico's president said Tuesday that electric-car company Tesla has committed to building a major plant in the industrial hub of Monterrey in northern Mexico.

President Andrés Manuel López Obrador said the promise came in phone calls he had with Tesla head Elon Musk. It would be Tesla's third plant outside the U.S., after one in Shanghai and one near Berlin.

López Obrador had previously ruled out such a plant in the arid northern state of Nuevo León where Monterrey is the capital because he didn't want water-hungry factories in a region that suffers water shortages. But he said Musk's company had offered commitments to address those concerns, including using recycled water.

“There is one commitment that all the water used in the manufacture of electric automobiles will be recycled water,” López Obrador said.

The president said it would be a large investment without giving a dollar amount, and did not specify what the plant would produce. He said it was unclear if it would produce batteries, an industry Mexico desperately wants despite not having any current domestic supply of lithium.

“This is going to mean a considerable investment and many, many jobs,” López Obrador said. “My understanding is that it will be very big.”

Monterrey is highly industrialized and close to the U.S. border and had long been considered the front-runner for any Tesla investment.

The city suffered water shortages in 2022 that were so severe that many homes went weeks with intermittent or no water supply. The government is building a 60-mile pipeline to bring more water in from a dam.

López Obrador had previously said his government “simply won't grant permits” for any new plants there. But apparently Musk's proposal overrode the president's stance.

Compiled from Bloomberg and Associated Press reports.