Democrats are lambasting former President Donald Trump for a recent attempt to take credit for lowering prices for insulin.
“Why is Trump lying and trying to take credit for a law that Dems passed and Biden signed?” said Rep. Ted Lieu (D-Calif.), a member of House Democratic leadership and part of the legislative chamber’s Judiciary Committee. “Because Trump knows he’s vulnerable on this issue. Biden lowered drug costs such as insulin. In contrast, when Trump was president, he did a tax giveaway to billionaires and corporations.”
Lieu was responding to a post in which Trump claimed that incumbent President Joe Biden had “nothing to do with” lowering insulin costs for Americans, though in reality, a cap on insulin prices for Medicare recipients was included in the Inflation Reduction Act, a landmark piece of legislation finalized in the House and Senate by Democrats and signed by this president. According to a CNBC report, Trump did sign an executive order setting up a separate insulin price limit, but legislation — like the Inflation Reduction Act — is frequently understood as a more lasting solution.
Trump’s commentary completely skips over the substance of the updates to insulin pricing included in the Inflation Reduction Act, which is a moniker for the budget reconciliation deal secured by Senate Democrats after a lengthy, intra-party back-and-forth.
The Biden campaign also blasted Trump for the comments, saying that a “desperate and delusional Trump tries to take credit for President Biden’s historic law lowering insulin costs.”
Trump remains infamously opposed to the Affordable Care Act, otherwise known as Obamacare, though Republicans have failed ever since its inception to fully overturn it, which the party pursued again when Trump was in office as president. Towards the end of Trump’s term, his administration supported the prospective reversal of the sweeping law in a challenge at the U.S. Supreme Court, though they had no replacement in effect for the millions of Americans it covered.
