This is the Cato Daily Podcast for Monday, August 15th, 2022.

I'm Caleb Brown. Federal lawmakers crow about limiting the cost to consumers of

insulin, a product absolutely essential to diabetics.

But there are moves Congress could have made that would also have brought down the price of

insulin, while also making our health care marketplace considerably more rational.

Cato's Michael Cannon comments.

So yeah, the proposal was to cap the out-of-pocket exposure that diabetic patients with private insurance

would face when purchasing insulin, cap it at $35 per month and the Democrats proposed that Republican opposition blocked it.

A lot of people went to the Internet to complain about it.

One of them was Nancy Pelosi, Democratic Speaker of the House of Representatives and they claimed that this was cruel to do to

Diabetics who are really legitimately suffering under the high and rising

preaches that the three existing manufacturers charge for insulin.

But it's a mistake to think that simply capping out-of-pocket exposure for insulin purchases is going to solve the underlying problems in the

insulin market.

All right, so you mentioned there are three manufacturers of insulin.

That seems low? It is. of the

and that's a result of the

number of barriers to entry the government puts in the way of of other potential manufacturers who might enter the insulin market and as a result of

additional government interventions, those three manufacturers are allowed to jack up,

are able to jack up the price of insulin year after year after year to the point where it has

doubled or more than doubled over the past 10 years,

even though there aren't any improvements in the quality of the particular insulin products

...