Republicans could have helped Democrats save the lives of diabetics. They refused

More than 1.3 million people are forced to put their lives in danger every day because they can’t afford their life-saving prescriptions. Congress could have fixed that this year, but Republicans in the Senate refused to do it. Repeatedly.

The Annals of Internal Medicine published a study Monday estimating that 16.5% of adults with diabetes delay, skip, ration, and decrease their prescribed doses of insulin because of the cost. Dr. Steffie Woolhandler, a study author and professor at the City University of New York’s Hunter College, explained how dangerous the escalating costs of the drug are to public health. “This is very, very worrisome to doctors,” said Woolhandler. “If people have poorly controlled diabetes … they end up with lots of complications and earlier death.”

Patients in the U.S. pay as much as 10 times more than those in 32 foreign countries in the OECD, according to a 2018 analysis. The average price for a standard unit of insulin, which costs less than $10 to produce was $98.70 in the U.S., $8.81 in those countries. “The fact of the matter is that insulin is far more expensive in the United States than in other countries,” said Dr. Adam Gaffney, a Harvard Medical School pulmonary and critical care physician who is the lead author of the study. “To further compound the problem, we have a particularly fragmented health insurance system.”

Democrats single-handedly passed a price cap on insulin for people on Medicare this summer, fixing as much of the problem as Republicans would allow. A provision of the Inflation Reduction Act caps the cost of insulin for people on Medicare at $35 a month. They used a process to pass that bill that didn’t rely on Republican votes, but that doesn’t mean that Republicans couldn’t join them on the bill.