Arizona Republican with a diabetes ‘fix’ voted against out-of-pocket limits for insulin

Rep. David Schweikert (R-Ariz.) has what he describes as a “fixation” about how the disease of diabetes is affecting the United States.

Late last month, Schweikert made federal spending on diabetes care the focus of a speech on the floor of the House on how to deal with the national debt.

The next day, in a congressional hearing On the economic effects of diabetes, Schweikert expressed hope that reducing diabetes rates and finding better treatments could be priorities that unite Democrats and Republicans.

“Maybe there’s a time here where this isn’t Republican or Democrat, right or left,” said Schweikert, who is vice chair of the Joint Economic Committee, the two-house panel that convened the hearing. “It’s really about what’s going on in our society and our moral obligation to find a way to end this misery.”

But Schweikert’s lofty rhetoric is at odds with aspects of his record. In the last Congress, Schweikert voted against a bipartisan bill that would have provided relief for diabetes patients struggling to pay for insulin, a hormone that allows people to regulate their blood sugar.

Insulin, which scientists first isolated and used to treat diabetes in the early 1920sit is not patented. But why insulin production is controlled by just three companies, the price has tripled in the last two decades, causing 1 in 4 Americans with diabetes to ration their supply.

In March 2022, the House of Representatives, then under Democratic control, passed the Affordable Insulin Now Act, which would have capped monthly insulin spending for Medicare and private insurance enrollees to $35. twelve republicans joined all House Democrats in voting for the bill, but Schweikert was not one of them.

The House bill, as written, did not become law. But in August 2022, President Joe Biden Inflation Reduction Law (IRA) included a reduced version of the provision, which limited monthly out-of-pocket costs for insulin to $35 for Medicare beneficiaries. Schweikert also voted against.

Those votes have become fodder for Democratic attacks on Schweikert, who represents a Phoenix-area district where voters narrowly favored Biden over then-President Donald Trump in 2020.

The campaign arm of the House Democrats, the Democratic Congressional Campaign Committee, has made ousting Schweikert a priority in the 2024 election cycle.

“David Schweikert spends his days in Congress lecturing insincerely on issues affecting millions of Americans, then votes against legislation that would limit the cost of insulin to $35 a month,” said Justin Chermol, a spokesman. of DCCC, in a statement. “For David Schweikert: everything is words, there are no solutions”.

Schweikert opposed the insulin cap bill because it does nothing to reduce the underlying cost of insulin, according to Schweikert spokesman Hunter Lovell. Instead, Schweikert is interested in removing the barriers faced by new market entrants, such as the nonprofit drugmaker civic rxwho plans to sell insulin for $30 a vial.

“By passing the Cut Inflation Act, Democrats gave Big Pharma billions in subsidies to lower the price of insulin, while ignoring market competition to lower the cost of prescription drugs,” Lovell said in a statement. “Since most insulin is off-patent anymore, the solution to lowering costs should not be a command-and-control rationing model, but rather a market supply model that encourages more companies to invest in the manufacturing business. ”.

To be sure, Schweikert is not alone in this particular criticism. Following the passage of the House bill, the centrist Center for a Responsible Federal Budget lament that limiting the out-of-pocket costs of insulin without addressing the underlying price amounts to a cost change that would “be more than offset by higher premiums and costs to taxpayers.”

Some progressive advocates of top-down price controls have also criticized the insulin provisions in the IRA for failing to obtain the underlying costs, as well as the law’s inapplicability to private health insurance enrollees and the uninsured. Instead, these progressives have rallied behind the Insulin for All Acta bill introduced by Rep. Cori Bush (D-Mo.) and Sen. Bernie Sanders (I-Vt.) that would prohibit drug manufacturers from selling insulin for more than $20 per vial.

But another component of the IRA directly addressed the underlying cost of drugs by empowering Medicare to negotiate lower prices on prescription drugs and biologics for the first time since the program began covering those treatments two decades ago. However, Schweikert had nothing good to say on the entire bill.

As for Schweikert’s plans to encourage competition among drugmakers, his proposals remain relatively broad.

On his part of the Joint Economic Committee annual report This year, Schweikert floats the idea of ​​speeding up federal approval of generic drugs and reducing the role of third-party pharmacy benefit managers to give consumers more power.

It has not yet introduced legislation to effect these changes.