Health care: insulin costs and importing drugs from Canada
What they say
His campaign's health-care page says he passed two measures on drug costs in the Texas Legislature, one capping insulin copayments at $25 a month and one letting Texas import prescription drugs from Canada.
“So when I got elected, I passed bills that capped insulin copays at $25 a month and allowed Texas to import cheaper prescription drugs from Canada at a fraction of what they cost in the U.S. due to price gouging by Big Pharma.”
What the record shows ·
Both measures are law and the figures are exact. HB 25 of the 88th Legislature, the wholesale prescription drug importation act, lists him as the first of five authors, with 117 coauthors and Senator Kolkhorst as its Senate sponsor; it took effect September 1, 2023, and Texas Legislature Online indexes it under CANADA. On insulin, SB 827 of the 87th Legislature took effect September 1, 2021, and its enrolled text bars a health plan from imposing a cost-sharing requirement where "the total amount the enrollee is required to pay exceeds $25 per prescription for a 30-day supply", which is the cap he describes. On that bill the Author field names Senator Kolkhorst and fourteen joint authors, and the House Sponsor field names two members, Lucio III and Talarico, in that order.
Limit: The word doing the work is "passed", and it holds differently on the two bills. On the importation act he is the first-named author of a House bill that became law. On the insulin cap he is the second of the two House sponsors of a Senate bill someone else authored; unlike the single-name Sponsor field on a federal bill, the Texas record can and does name more than one sponsor, so it is able to record a co-lead and here it records him second. Neither bill is his alone, and both carry large bipartisan coauthor lists. Whether the importation programme has begun operating, and what either law has done to prices, are questions this card does not assess.