The BDN Opinion section operates independently and does not set news policies or contribute to reporting or editing articles elsewhere in the newspaper or on bangordailynews.com.
Amy Fried is a retired political science professor at the University of Maine. Her views are her own and do not represent those of any group with which she is affiliated.
Prescription drugs can be expensive, but not getting them costs a lot, too. If people don’t take their medications, they can spiral into serious illnesses and even die. Now, because of legislation signed by President Joe Biden, life-saving prescriptions are far more affordable.
Consider diabetes. When it’s out of control, people can lose limbs, harm their eyesight, hearts, hearing and kidneys. Diabetes kills people.
Maine has the highest death rate from diabetes in New England. According to the American Diabetes Association, over 10 percent of Mainers have been diagnosed with diabetes and over 35 percent have prediabetes. Financially speaking, diabetes costs Maine a whopping $1.4 billion a year. These are expenses paid by everyone in the health care system, and diabetics themselves have more than twice as much medical expenses than people without diabetes.
Not every person with diabetes needs insulin, but an awful lot do.
For years politicians talked about lowering the cost of insulin. President Donald Trump said a lot but his take on what his administration did was dishonest.
In a 2020 presidential debate Trump claimed he made insulin so cheap that it was “like water,” but that wasn’t true. As the Washington Post reported, Trump’s statement “came as a shock to the Americans who shell out hundreds of dollars a month on insulin, a number of whom posted triple-digit pharmacy bills to social media immediately after the president’s assertion.”
President Trump’s actions were like his movement on an infrastructure bill. Trump kept saying it was Infrastructure week but, unlike Biden, he never passed infrastructure legislation.
Less than a month before the end of the Trump administration, it finalized a rule mandating the Department of Health and Human Services to act to lower insulin prices at federally funded health clinics. This was not legislation, the rule was never implemented and it would have affected a small percentage of people needing insulin.
Because the way it was crafted would have raised administrative costs and taken funds from patients in these clinics, the Biden administration rescinded the rule.
Although some claimed that Biden thus increased the price of insulin, that’s not so. As one fact-checker put it, Biden didn’t cause “the price of insulin to increase at community health centers, and there is no evidence to suggest the rule would further lower insulin costs at those facilities, which already offer deep discounts on medication.”
Moreover, the Biden administration has lowered the price of insulin. The Inflation Reduction Act, which all Republicans voted against, capped the price of insulin for people on Medicare at $35 a month. This matters a great deal since Medicare recipients were two-thirds of those whose families had “catastrophic spending for insulin.”
Since the passage of the Inflation Reduction Act and, after President Biden called on drug manufacturers to lower insulin costs for all, pharmaceutical companies announced they would cut their list price by 70 percent or more.
And insulin isn’t the only prescription drug that Biden targeted for cost reductions. The Inflation Reduction Act included other provisions on drug costs, including one backed by more than three-quarters of Americans: Medicare negotiating drug prices. This will save tens of billions of dollars for taxpayers and for Americans getting these prescriptions. In late August 2023, the administration released a list of the first 10 drugs — for treating and preventing strokes, heart disease, arthritis, blood cancers, Crohn’s disease, blood clots and diabetes — which will have their costs negotiated.
Also coming in 2025, unless it’s repealed by a Republican president and Congress if they are elected in 2024 — is a cap on out-of-pocket prescription drug prices for Medicare recipients of $2000 a year.
As Steven Hadfield, a 71 year old man with diabetes and a blood cancer, put it a few months ago, he has been “a hard worker all my life” but drug prices were a huge burden and he’s “had to ration some of his drugs because they were just so expensive.” Said Hadfield, “Thanks to President Biden, that’s changing. He’s finally ending Big Pharma’s one-sided pricing power, and giving seniors like me a break.”
