Use insulin? Idaho’s senators just hung you out to dry. Thank them for your next bill

Idaho’s Senate delegation shows no sign of cleaning up its act. It continues to put the interests of wealthy donors and the national Republican party ahead of the citizens of the state of Idaho. And on Sunday night, they did so in an especially egregious fashion.

Last week, we noted that Sen. Mike Crapo — who recently received a massive infusion of campaign cash from the pharmaceutical industry — was working to raise objections to allowing the federal government to negotiate the prices Medicare pays for prescription drugs.

This week, he succeeded. Crapo — along with Sen. Jim Risch — voted against including a provision in the Inflation Reduction Act that would cap the monthly out-of-pocket costs for people who use insulin at $35. Seven Republicans, either more concerned about their constituents’ welfare or more concerned they might lose a general election race, crossed party lines to support the effort.

But not Crapo and Risch. They acted, along with only 41 other Republicans, to ensure people with diabetes will pay more.

Insulin, a cash cow for some of the pharmaceutical companies Crapo and Risch are protecting, has grown so expensive that a Yale study found about one in seven daily insulin users spend 40% of their income after food and housing on the drug.

And the price has utterly skyrocketed, for a very old drug that isn’t the subject of a great deal of recent innovation.

Why? It isn’t manufacturing costs or higher demand or anything like that. There are only a few companies that control nearly all of the insulin market, and they can simply pay their shareholders more if they set prices that send a significant portion of the patients who need them into poverty. And corporations answer to shareholders.

These high prices don’t just hit people’s pocketbooks. They have enormous health consequences. As the Idaho Capital Sun reported, one in four diabetics say that they have rationed their insulin — which can cause sustained high blood sugar levels and result in organ damage or even death.

No other developed country is foolish enough to allow a situation like this to persist. As a RAND study indicates, Americans pay about 10 times as much for insulin as citizens of peer countries.

That’s why government intervention is needed. Cap the price, and the drug will still be profitable, just not outlandishly so. And diabetics will get the insulin they need.

Crapo was on the record supporting a similar cap just a few months ago, though one that would only aid those who have purchased enhanced Medicaid Part D plans. But on Sunday night, he voted to kill a better version of the same proposal.

Maybe Crapo and Risch simply didn’t want to give the Democrats a victory to tout in the midterms. And the continued suffering of people with diabetes — that’s just the cost of doing business.

But it’s utterly unacceptable behavior from people who were elected to represent their constituents — not their party or big pharma or whoever their latest campaign donor is. And about 137,000 of those constituents have diabetes, according to the Department of Health and Welfare.

Those people deserve better than the treatment they’re getting from Crapo and Risch.

This story was originally published August 9, 2022 at 4:00 AM.