Last night before adjourning, the House passed a bill to cap the price of insulin at $35 a month, every single Democrat + a dozen Republicans voting yes, 193 Republicans voting no. Can the bill now attract 10 Republican senators (+ Sinema and Manchin) to overcome McConnell's filibuster in the upper chamber? Maybe 2 or 3... 10, not a chance. After all, passage would make the lives of as many as 30 million Americans suffering with diabetes better and that's against the Republicans' most scared core value: "do no good." So... just a Democratic messaging bill for the midterms?
As usual, the Republicans said they favor cheaper insulin too-- but, according deceitful corporate shill Cathy McMorris Rodgers (R-WA), "This bill is not the right answer." What is? Nothing the GOP has ever come up with.
After passage last night, the NY Times' Margot Sanger-Katz wrote that "the insulin bill represents a substantial scaling back of Democratic ambitions to tackle high drug prices for all Americans. A broader prescription drug package, written as part of the $2.2 trillion social spending and climate bill that has stalled in the Senate, would limit price increases on all prescription drugs, improve the generosity of Medicare’s drug coverage, and allow the government to negotiate directly on the price of some drugs used by Medicare patients, while also limiting insulin co-payments. Other parts of the broader bill would expand health insurance coverage, extending insulin coverage to diabetes patients who are uninsured. The bill that passed the House on Thursday would not improve the affordability of insulin for people who lack health insurance. The insulin bill may be the Democrats’ best chance of passing part of their popular prescription drug agenda, as the future of the larger package remains unclear. 'If the effort to address drug prices ends with this plan to cap out-of-pocket costs for insulin, it will amount to crumbs compared to Democrats’ initial ambitions to allow the government to negotiate drug prices,' said Larry Levitt, the executive vice president for health policy at the Kaiser Family Foundation, a health research group."
And today the House will pass a bill legalizing marijuana, the Marijuana Opportunity Reinvestment and Expungement (MORE) Act, although most GOP congressmen are set to vote NO, despite most Republican voters favoring it. Will it pass the Senate? Maybe, but with two of the worst right-wing Democrats-- Joe Manchin and Jeanne Shaheen-- opposed, it will need at least a dozen Republicans willing to vote to end McConnell's filibuster.
Can you imagine Lindsey Graham or Joe Biden talking about mansions with 25 bathrooms?