In June 2019, Lija Greenseid handed Minnesota Gov. Tim Walz an empty vial of insulin that her 13-year-old daughter had painted gold.
Greenseid’s daughter has Type 1 diabetes, which means she requires daily injections of manufactured insulin to stay alive. The price of a single vial of insulin rose by about 1,200% between 1996 and 2018, and the gold vial was a reminder, Greenseid said, that this lifesaving pharmaceutical shouldn’t be as expensive as precious metal.
“What I heard is that that gold vial remained on his desk at the governor’s office, and he brought it up throughout that summer and fall when he was trying to talk to legislators to get them moving,” Greenseid said.
Ten months later, in April 2020, Walz signed the Alec Smith Insulin Affordability Act. The law was named after the 26-year-old Minnesotan whose 2017 death from rationing insulin became a catalyst for the patient advocates who turned the high cost of insulin in the U.S. into a national political priority.
Now it’s an issue in the presidential campaign. Both former President Donald Trump and Vice President Kamala Harris and her running mate, Walz, have sought to appeal to the nation’s 8.4 million insulin users and their families by touting policies that make insulin cheaper for some patients.
But advocates for diabetes patients fret that neither presidential candidate would go as far as Walz’s Minnesota law, which helps patients even if they are uninsured, despite the law being under legal attack by the drug industry.
The landscape on insulin pricing has already changed significantly in the past five years. One month after Walz signed the Minnesota law, the Trump administration announced a voluntary program for Medicare prescription drug plans to cap copayments for some insulin products at $35. Two years later, President Joe Biden signed a law requiring all Medicare drug plans to cap copayments for insulin at $35 a month.
Now, amid the current presidential campaign, Harris …