Claim: Vice President Kamala Harris said that President Joe Biden and her government had “finally” put a cap on how much insulin costs for seniors.
The truth is this is FALSE. During his time in office, former President Donald Trump capped the price of insulin for seniors. When Biden took office, he overturned Trump’s order.
Harris made the claim in an interview this week at an event in Philadelphia put on by the National Association of Black Journalists.
“Seniors can now get insulin for $35 a month, and the cost of prescription drugs for them is limited to $2,000 a year,” Harris said.
There was a plan by Trump in May 2020 to keep the price of Insulin for Medicare recipients at $35. The rule was supposed to start on January 22, 2021, but when the Biden-Harris government took office, it stopped right away.
Breitbart News said this:
“Trump was proud of his work to lower drug prices even though Congress wasn’t doing anything. He did this by reducing red tape at the Food and Drug Administration for drug approvals and using executive orders to try to get the drug business to lower prices. He worked with the industry in Operation Warp Speed to make vaccines much faster than anyone thought possible, but he often had public disagreements with the industry because it paid for ads that were negative about him. As a whole, prescription drug prices went down for the first time in almost 50 years under President Trump.”
As explained in the Policy & Medicine article “Biden Administration Rescinds Trump Administration Insulin Pricing Rule,” the Biden Administration put off the rule three times before it went into effect on July 20, 2021. The first chance for HHS to enforce the rule’s requirements would have been through grants given in fiscal year 2022.
After first putting Trump’s order to lower the cost of insulin on hold and then taking it back, Biden asked Congress to lower the cost of insulin in his 2022 State of the Union speech. Then, in the Inflation Reduction Act, Congress included steps to do that.
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