MINE! MINE! MINE! Says Trump About $35 Insulin That Was Not In Fact His.
What a maroon!
As we mentioned earlier, Donald Trump gave a bizarre speech in North Carolina yesterday that was supposed to be about “economy.” As you’d expect, the idiot kept going off the rails and lying about almost everything else, instead of sticking to the script on his teleprompter and only lying about the economy like he was supposed to.
Still, Trump managed to work in one of his favorite lies, a very old lie about the $35 price cap on insulin for Medicare beneficiaries that was included in the 2022 Inflation Reduction Act. The always good “Kamala HQ” Twitter account caught the lie and corrected the record, so we figured we’d follow up by explaining what the hell Trump is lying about, since he and his idiot supporters keep bringing it up again and again.
In the attached video, Trump lies, “Kamala and Joe tried to take credit for $35 insulin. You know that, you know I did that. I did that. I did the insulin.” Here’s the video.
Well, no, he did not, no matter how many times Trump says it — he also repeated it in his June debate with Joe Biden, although there it may have been lost among all the far bigger lies.
As a fact-check by KFF Health News and Politifact explains, Trump did, late in his presidency, create a pilot program to reduce insulin costs for some patients on Medicare. But the Trump program was far more limited than the insulin cap in the IRA: For starters, it was a voluntary program that allowed some Medicare Part D prescription plans to cap copays for at least one of each type of insulin at $35 a month. As KFF and Politifact note,
The program began Jan. 1, 2021, and ran through Dec. 31, 2023. In 2022, the Trump-era program included a total of 2,159 Medicare drug plans, and CMS estimated that more than 800,000 Medicare beneficiaries who use insulin could have benefited from it that year.
“Could have” is doing a fair bit of work there; we weren’t able to find an actual tally of how many people actually benefited from the pilot plan.
By contrast, the IRA’s $35 insulin price cap was mandatory and benefits all Medicare recipients, in all Part D plans as well as in regular Medicare Part B, which also covers medical equipment like insulin pumps — which weren’t part of the Trump pilot either. Further, the IRA required that the “out-of-pocket price cap apply to all insulin products a given Medicare plan covers, not just a subset.”
In short: No, Trump’s two-year, voluntary Medicare Part D only pilot plan to limit some insulin copays was OK, but very limited in effect. He most certainly did not “do the insulin” for the millions of people who are benefiting right now from the permanent Biden-Harris insulin cap. He’s lying.
And yes, both Project 2025 and the Republican Study Committee’s “Fiscal Sanity to Save America” budget plan call for repealing the IRA in its entirety, which means goodbye not only to the insulin price cap, but also to the annual $2000 cap on out-of-pocket Medicare co-pays, and to negotiated lower prices for some of the most expensive prescription drugs covered by Part D.
Speaking of which! The total savings for the first round of Medicare drug price negotiations will come to about $6 billion for seniors, the Centers for Medicare and Medicaid Services announced Wednesday, with savings in 2026, the first year for the new prices, coming in at $1.5 billion and continuing from there.
That’s pretty impressive when you consider that just 10 medications are covered by the first tranche of price negotiations, with new rounds of negotiated prices to cover additional drugs each year going forward. As the Washington Post points out (gift link),
Medicare beneficiaries in 2022 collectively spent $3.4 billion to cover out-of-pocket costs on those drugs, according to a federal analysis released last year. The drugs also represented about one-fifth of the Medicare prescription drug program’s total spending.
Ten freaking drugs! And as we say, this is just the beginning of the savings to Medicare enrollees; President Biden and VP Harris are scheduled to have a joint appearance today at 1:30 Eastern to talk about the administration’s progress on reducing prescription drug prices, and we will of course carry the livestream right here on Wonkette.
Seems like the kind of thing Americans would want to keep going, instead of handing over the presidency to a couple of fascist goobers who want to blow up the IRA, among other things like the planet’s climate and democracy.
[KFF Health News / Kamala HQ on Twitter / Center for American Progress / WaPo (gift link)]
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It's interesting, innit, that if a Democratic administration manages to get the government to control pricing, that's SOCIALISMZ, but if a Republican does it (or more accurately, lies his ass off about doing it), it's "fixing stuff."
OT, but not by much, as it is medical news: As some of the noncommentariat know, I have MS. I had a follow-up MRI about six weeks ago. The results were posted to my chart today. They show that my condition has slightly improved (I thought as much, but I didn't want to be fooling myself). There's still no cure. Research continues, and there is still hope.