We’ve been hearing for years about how the U.S.’ two major political parties have realigned on economic issues, and the new breed of MAGA Republicans aren’t like the old corporate Reaganite Republicans. They’re “populists.” I’ve even heard the claim that, however conservative they may be on social issues, their economic views approximate those of democratic socialists like Sen. Bernie Sanders.
Now, the House just passed a measure to cap the price of insulin at $35 a month. And yet the loudest MAGA-ites all voted against HR 6833—the Affordable Insulin Now Act. Take a look at the roll call. Marjorie Taylor Greene voted “nay.” Madison Cawthorn and Lauren Boebert? Nay, nay. Paul Gosar, Louie Gohmert, and Matt Gaetz? Nay, nay, and nay.
You can argue that politicians of many different ideological hues are often corrupt (or simply insincere) and fail to live up to their crowd-pleasing rhetoric. And that’s true. But these are supposed to be the hardest core—the GOP’s equivalent of Bernie or the Squad. And they couldn’t even vote to throw the tiniest bone to suffering people at the expense of corporate profits. (37.3 million Americans, or one in every 10 Americans, has diabetes, according to the CDC.)
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The idea that the price of insulin is just being capped—rather than made free to those who need it—says depressing things about the level of resistance to more meaningful reform among our political elites. Medicare for All is supported by well over half of the American public—and a “public option” in healthcare is backed by an even bigger majority. The insulin issue is a perfect demonstration of why these proposals resonate with so many people.
Try to imagine this happening in other scenarios.
Imagine that before the police investigated death threats from a stalker, you had to pay a fee at the Police Department’s reception desk. Or that when you stood on your front lawn watching your house burn down, the local fire captain approached you with a portable card reader so you could swipe or tap your debit card before he let his men take out their hoses and get to work. Would you be concerned with making these services more “affordable”—or would you regard the very idea that they would be treated as commodities as a moral abomination?
You can’t be denied entrance to an emergency room because of your inability to pay. (You’ll just be bankrupted by the bill if you live.) You can, however, be denied life-saving insulin.
As of last August, there were 3,600 campaigns on GoFundMe that mentioned “diabetes” or “insulin.” In one disturbing case that went viral a couple of years ago, Shane Patrick Boyle died after falling $50 short in his GoFundMe effort to raise $750 to buy a month of insulin. He “succumbed to diabetic ketoacidosis while rationing his last vial of insulin, which made his blood acidic.” It’s a “horrendously painful” way to die.
As conservatives never tire of pointing out, someone has to pay for “free” services. Yet when it comes to services ranging from fire protection to K-12 public schools, the moral calculation is it’s better for everyone to pay for them through progressive taxation. That means no one has to think about money when they call 9-1-1 or enroll their child in school. This concept has become so baked into how we understand what it is to live in a civilized society, that the very thought of charging for these things at the point of service sounds like the stuff of dystopian science fiction.
If that calculation should be applied to anything, it should be medicine. Charging a diabetic for their insulin is like charging someone on a future colony on the moon for their month’s supply of breathable air.
Given all that, it’s pathetic that the best President Joe Biden can do is push for a limit on how much people are shaken down for the privilege of continuing to draw breath. And it was telling that in the same State of the Union speech where he introduced the idea, he announced that new anti-viral treatments for COVID were going to be offered for free. COVID is a unique crisis and, thus, centrists are willing to situationally support Medicare for All. The 100,000 people who die every year of diabetes, though? That just feels like business as usual.
It's also worth noting that the Affordable Insulin Now Act wouldn’t have saved Shane Patrick Boyle, who lost his benefits because he’d moved across state lines to care for his ailing mother. It also wouldn’t help many of the thousands of people currently raising money to pay for their insulin—who don’t have health insurance at all. The only thing the Act would do is stop insurers from passing on more $35 a month of the cost to diabetics.
And even that was too much for the allegedly “populist” and anti-“corporate” MAGA wing of the GOP. It’s a ludicrously tiny infringement on the Divine Right of Corporations to make as much money as all possible, at the expense of suffering people. That was too much for the MAGA populists.
If you can see this shameful episode and still believe that “economic populism” exists in any meaningful way on the American Right, I have a whole series of bridges to sell you.
