Trump Took Credit for Making Insulin “So Cheap It’s Like Water.” Tell That to People Paying for It.

“The sticker price for a three-month supply of the insulin I take is over $7,500.”

Donald Trump

Julio Cortez / Associated Press

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There was a key moment that you might have missed in Tuesdayā€™s presidential debate. It happened early on, before President Trump told a neofascist militia to ā€œstand by,ā€ invented an endorsement from an Oregon sheriff, and trampled on the memory of Joe Bidenā€™s dead son. Trump, after being criticized by Biden for his ongoing efforts to blow up the Affordable Care Act, tried to change the subject by talking about all the work heā€™s doing to bring down the cost of prescription drugs.

ā€œIā€™ll give you an example,ā€ Trump said. ā€œInsulinā€”it was destroying families, destroying people, the cost. Iā€™m getting it for so cheap itā€™s like water, you want to know the truth. So cheap.ā€

So cheap itā€™s like water.

I did a double take when I heard this, because insulin is expensive as hell, and no, the president hasnā€™t fixed that. How expensive? ā€œIn reality, insulin still retails for roughly $300 a vial,ā€ wrote Nicholas Florko at Stat News. ā€œMost patients with diabetes need two to three vials per month, and some can require much more.ā€ 

When I sent a tweet about this, I was flooded with responses from people sharing their own stories of how much they pay for insulin and other diabetes medication, sometimes attaching literal receipts. People pay more just to stay alive than the president paid in taxes in 2017:

The cost of insulin, which people with type-1 diabetes need to inject regularly, tripled between 2009 and 2017 because of predatory pricing decisions by drug companies. That had terrible health and financial consequences on the people who rely on the medication to live. A study last year found that a full quarter of type-1 diabetes patients were rationing their insulin because they couldnā€™t afford it. What made the price-gouging all the more glaring was the origin story of the medication; its inventors famously refused to even put their names on it, believing that it belonged to the whole world and should be, well, almost as cheap as water.

Trump, Wallace noted in his preceding question, has ā€œnever come up with a comprehensive plan to replace Obamacareā€ despite years of promising to improve the American health care system. Instead he has issued a stream of executive orders designed to give the appearance of tackling problems like prescription drug pricesā€”most notably, insulin.

The administration made headlines in March when it announced plans to cap the monthly cost of insulin at $35 for seniorsā€”but as Stat News noted, that discount (which is hardly as cheap as water) was limited to ā€œa fraction of seniors enrolled in certain pricey private insurance plans.ā€ And it would have no impact on the young people without insurance who had turned to rationing.

Likewise, when Trump signed four executive orders on prescription drug prices in July, which he said would lower the cost of insulin from ā€œbig dollars to virtual pennies,ā€ the Washington Post reported that it was mostly posturing:

However, the moves are largely symbolic because the orders are unlikely to take effect anytime soon, if they do so at all, because the power to implement drug pricing policy through executive order is limited. Voters will not see an impact before the November elections, and the drug industry is sure to challenge them in court.

And an analysis from the independent fact-checking site PolitiFact rated the presidentā€™s claim that insulin costs had been seriously cut ā€œmostly false,ā€ and emphasized just how limited his purportedly sweeping reforms were. ā€œA recent executive order on insulin would touch fewer than 20% of clinics through a program that provides 10% or less of all prescription drugs.ā€

In practice, according to Kaiser Health News, the executive orders heā€™s signed are ā€œfar from being implementedā€ and are not likely to ā€œpass along drug-pricing discounts to a majority of Americans.ā€

To the extent that insulin costs have gone down in recent months for a lot of people, itā€™s because companies simply decided to lower them during the pandemicā€”a good public relations move, but not a substitute for long-term policy.

Trump, who also boasted about lowering drug prices during his Republican National Convention speech, seems like heā€™s sticking to this talking point. But for everything else that happened on Tuesday, this might be the kind of subtle moment that voters rememberā€”Biden or outside groups might remind themā€”because the people Trump is messaging to are the ones best equipped to call his bluff. You can get away with lying about things that are abstract. Declare often enough that antifa is invading the suburbs and people might believe it. Spin enough stories about ballots ending up in rivers (what was that, anyway?) and a kernel of doubt might form. But itā€™s another thing to lie about something so intrinsic to peopleā€™s livesā€”a medication that people pay for every month so they don’t die. Either you’ve delivered insulin for “virtual pennies” or you haven’t.

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Readers also told us to just give it to you straight when we need to ask for your support, and seeing how matter-of-factly explaining our inner workings, our challenges and finances, can bring more of you in has been a real silver lining. So our online membership lead, Brian, lays it all out for you in his personal, insider account (that literally puts his skin in the game!) of how urgent things are right now.

The upshot: Being able to rally $253,000 in donations over these next few weeks is vitally important simply because it is the number that keeps us right on track, helping make sure we don't end up with a bigger gap than can be filled again, helping us avoid any significant (and knowable) cash-flow crunches for now. We used to be more nonchalant about coming up short this time of year, thinking we can make it by the time June rolls around. Not anymore.

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