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1.3 million Americans risk their lives rationing insulin. Republicans don't care enough to fix that [1]
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Date: 2022-10-18
Not only did Republicans refuse to help pass that bill, they blocked that price cap on insulin from being available to everyone with health insurance. That provision was in the bill, but keeping it there required 60 votes. But 43 Republican senators forced it to be stripped out, including three who are up for reelection this year—Marco Rubio of Florida, Ron Johnson of Wisconsin, and Tim Scott of South Carolina.
Those three could have saved the day. There were seven Republicans who decided that they weren’t cruel enough to want diabetics’ premature deaths on their heads and voted with Democrats. If the three of them gave a damn about the lives of actually birthed people, rather than restricting their “pro-life” actions to fetuses, more people could afford to live.
Democrats—singlehandedly—will have helped the 11% of diabetics on Medicare who reported they have had to ration their insulin. The more than 20% of younger adults with diabetes who reported they skimp on their use of insulin. That’s one-fifth of people in America with diabetes who are risking their lives because they can’t afford a drug that would cost them less than $10 if they lived in a civilized nation.
Rubio and Scott didn’t really bother to defend their votes. Johnson claimed he did it because Democrats were doing it the wrong way.
x Lying Dems and their friends in corporate media are at it again, distorting a Democrat “gotcha” vote. In reality, the Dems wanted to break Senate rules to pass insulin pricing cap instead of going through regular order. They put this in a bill it wasn't allowed in, all for show. — Senator Ron Johnson (@SenRonJohnson) August 7, 2022
He’s not against people affording insulin, he’s against Democrats using a legislative process they all agreed to allow to do it.
Sen. Raphael Warnock (D-GA) is one of the leaders in the Senate trying to make insulin affordable for everyone. Here’s what his opponent—who actually could become a U.S. Senator—said about the issue in their only debate: “I believe in reducing insulin but at the same time, you gotta eat right. I know many people that’s on insulin. Unless you’re eating right, insulin is doing you no good. So you have to get food prices down and you gotta get gas down so you can go get insulin.”
I’ll just leave that there.
Given majorities in Congress next year, Democrats will take up the issue again, and this time could prevail if the Senate majority is big enough to kick Joe Manchin and Kyrsten Sinema to the curb and get rid of the legislative filibuster. But that means a Democratic majority. It means a serious upgrade in Wisconsin and the end of Ron Johnson’s political life. It means keeping Herschel Walker the hell out of the place.
If we can hold on to all of our current seats and win two more, then Manchin and Sinema will no longer be able to block filibuster reform and everything that follows from it, from expanding voting rights to providing paid family leave to making insulin affordable for everyone who needs it. Please help make that happen.
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