Claim: Vice President Kamala Harris claimed that President Joe Biden and her administration “finally” capped the cost of insulin for seniors.
Verdict: FALSE. Former President Donald Trump first capped the cost of insulin prices for seniors during his administration, and Biden suspended Trump’s executive order upon entering office.
Harris’s claim came during an interview on Tuesday at an event sponsored by the National Association of Black Journalists in Philadelphia.
“We have now finally capped the cost of insulin for our seniors at $35 a month, capped the cost of prescription medication for our seniors at $2,000 a year,” Harris said.
In May 2020, Trump announced a plan to cap the price of Insulin at $35 for Medicare enrollees. The rule was set to take effect on January 22, 2021, but the Biden-Harris administration suspended it immediately upon taking office.
As Breitbart News reported:
Trump prided himself on efforts to lower drug prices in the absence of congressional action, cutting red tape at the Food and Drug Administration for drug approvals, and using executive orders in an effort to force the pharmaceutical industry to cut prices. Though he worked with the industry in Operation Warp Speed to develop vaccines far faster than anyone previously thought possible, he clashed repeatedly with the industry in public as it supported negative ads against him.
Under President Trump, prescription drug prices fell, on aggregate, for the first time in nearly half a century.
An article entitled “Biden Administration Rescinds Trump Administration Insulin Pricing Rule,” Policy & Medicine explained, “The Biden Administration delayed the rule twice before it became effective on July 20, 2021, and the first opportunity for HHS to impose the requirements of the rule would have been through grants awarded in fiscal year 2022.”
Then, after first suspending and then rescinding Trump’s executive order lowering the cost of insulin, Biden, during his State of the Union address in 2022, called on Congress to lower the cost of insulin. Congress then included measures to do so in the Inflation Reduction Act.
