The Democrats passed a scaled-back version of Joe Biden‘s long-sought social spending bill over the weekend but were unable to garner enough votes to pass a $35 monthly cap on insulin.
In a 15-hour-long amendment process, lawmakers considered over 30 proposed changes to the bill, and Senate Republicans were able to ax a provision that would have enacted the monthly cap on the private market. The provision failed to reach the 60-vote threshold a 57-43 vote. It would have affected over 150 million Americans who have health insurance.
It came up for a vote because the Senate parliamentarian determined that if the Democrats wanted to pass the measures as a reconciliation bill, they could not extend the cap to the private market. The bill had to be passed as a reconciliation bill to avoid the 60-vote threshold needed to avoid the filibuster in the evenly split Senate.
Senate Majority Leader Chuck Schumer (D-New York) said that he would bring it back up to vote again in the fall.
“They blocked a $35 price for insulin for non-Medicare people,” Schumer said during an appearance on MSNBC’s The Rachel Maddow Show. “We’re going to come back and make them vote on that again.”
Republican Sen. Chuck Grassley (Iowa) has already said he would vote differently in the fall if the $35 cap was a part of a bipartisan measure that Sens. Jeanne Shaheen (D-New Hampshire) and Susan Collins (R-Maine) have been working on.
“Vote on the cap was not [about] insulin. It was [about] Dems ignoring budget rules,” he tweeted. “Dear colleagues join me in supporting the Collins-Shaheen bill to cap insulin at $35 & enact [pharmacy benefit manager] reforms in a bipartisan way.”
