Opinion: Insulin vote shows how damaging obstructionist politics has become
“Senate Republicans on Sunday forced the removal of a Democratic proposal that would have capped insulin prices at $35 for private insurers, even as seven Republicans joined all 50 members of the Democratic caucus in an effort to preserve the provision in the climate, tax and health care spending bill.”
So reported the New York Times on Sunday, after the Senate passed the Inflation Reduction Act.
This small part of this budget bill encapsulates so many issues in our federal government these days.
First, the vote itself: in order to include price-capping in the bill, 60 votes were required. This is because of Senate filibuster and cloture rules. (The rest of the bill passed 51-50 because Senate rules prohibit filibustering budget bills, but the Senate Parliamentarian decided that the private insurance price-cap wasn’t a budget item.)
The filibuster’s origin is debated. It may exist by historical accident. It may be a long-running tradition of “talking filibuster,” where the business of the Senate was stopped by refusing to stop debating.
In any case, today we have a “silent filibuster,” which allows any senator to stop action on a bill by stating an intention to filibuster. The Senate must then override this intention by a vote of at least 60 senators to move the bill past debate and to a vote (cloture).
Some say the filibuster is a valuable tool for preventing tyranny of the majority. Others say it’s a barrier to progress. But there can be no question that filibustering is so easy that it is constantly used to prevent anything from happening at all.
The Senate has been gridlocked over matters large (major bills that will affect many aspects of American life) and small (political appointments to obscure offices held hostage as bargaining chips). Reform should be in the cards. Such an obstructive technique ought to be reserved for weighty matters, not trotted out for every occasion.
Second, and as important, is the subject matter. Insulin is necessary to keep many diabetics alive and healthy. According to the conservative think tank American Action Forum, one-quarter of health care spending in the U.S. was on people with diabetes as of April 2020.
While that spending is not necessarily all diabetes-related, it is pretty clear that keeping diabetics healthy would be good for reducing our overall spending on health care. And one key way of doing that is to make sure that all diabetics can access free or affordable insulin.
Capping out-of-pocket costs is one way to do that, a way that is backed by a bipartisan group in the Senate. Its failure is a disappointment, adds to the taxpayer burden for programs like Medicare and Medicaid, and is a cruel move by those Senate Republicans who have offered no alternative. (Iowa’s senators are among those who voted against the price cap.)
And insulin is just one facet of a medical industry that is riddled with problems. Insulin prices have been steeply increasing for about two decades.
In the same time, overall health care spending has also increased dramatically, outpacing inflation. This has been hurting Americans’ pocketbooks, even those with insurance. And, if we have learned nothing else from the COVID-19 pandemic, we should have learned that having health care tied directly to employment is a very big problem when many people are too sick or at-risk to work.
Ultimately, this incident demonstrates a troubling feature of our political parties, especially the Republicans: politicians obstruct all progress when their party is not in power rather than let the other side get credit for fixing obvious problems.
Our own Sen. Chuck Grassley has tried to reform prescription pricing before, and insulin prices affect his constituents. He still chose not to support this one, small, cost- and life-saving change — instead he joined his party in obstructing it. Our politicians seem too often to lose sight of their constituents and good governance in their effort to score political points.
Kelcey Patrick-Ferree and Shannon Patrick live in Iowa City. And biannual time changes must be abolished.
This article originally appeared on Iowa City Press-Citizen: Opinion: While Senate perfects art of filibuster, Americans suffer
