Biden touts insulin price cap despite its unclear outcome

WASHINGTON — President Joe Biden often focuses on insulin prices, promoting a $35 price cap for the medication for Americans on Medicare.

His reelection team has flooded swingstate airwaves with ads mentioning it, in English and Spanish. All that would seemingly add up to a sweeping 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 former President Donald Trump, Biden often overstates what those people who are eligible for the price cap once paid for insulin. It’s also not clear whether the number of Americans being helped will be enough to help sway November’s election, even in the contested states that could come down to a few thousand votes.

“It is about political signaling in a campaign much more than it is about demonstrating for people that they benefit from the insulin cap,” said Drew Altman, president and CEO of KFF, a nonprofit that researches health care issues. “It is a way to make concrete the fact that you are the health care candidate.”

Many who are benefiting from the price cap were already getting insulin at reduced prices, were already Biden supporters or both. But others who need reduced-price insulin cannot get it because they do not have Medicare or private health insurance.

Biden’s campaign is emphasizing his successful efforts to reduce insulin prices and contrasting that with Trump, who first ran for president promising to lower drug prices but took limited action in office.

Roughly 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 could die without regular access to it. The White House says nearly 4 million older people qualify for the new, lower price.

The price cap for Medicare recipients was part of the Inflation Reduction

Act, which originally sought to cap insulin at $35 for all those with health insurance. When it passed in 2022, it was scaled back by congressional Republicans to apply only to older adults.

Sen. Raphael Warnock, D-Ga., is sponsoring bipartisan legislation to make the $35 insulin cap universal, even for people without health insurance. In the meantime, he said, what’s been accomplished with Medicare recipients and drugmakers agreeing to reduce their prices is “literally saving lives and saving people money.”

That includes people like Tommy Marshall, a 56-yearold financial services consultant in Atlanta who has health insurance. He was diagnosed with Type 1 diabetes at age 45 and injects fast-acting insulin several times daily. He paid about $250 for four to eight weeks’ worth of medication last November, then saw the price fall by half in February, after Novo Nordisk agreed to cut prices.

“If I was his political consultant, I’d be telling (Biden) to talk about it constantly,” said Marshall, a lifelong Democrat.