Hospital transparency and insulin price cap bills advance to Senate floor

Hospital price transparency, insulin price caps, food regulations, and a slew of other healthcare bills advanced out of the Senate health committee on Wednesday ahead of the August congressional recess.Both Republicans and Democrats voted to support 13 bills meant to lower healthcare costs, revise pharmaceutical regulations, and implement food reforms.Healthcare costs have become a central issue ahead of the 2026 midterm elections, as voters rank being able to afford healthcare as a greater concern than economic worries such as inflation. While many of the bills directly address healthcare costs through hospitals and pharmaceuticals, Sen. Bernie Sanders (I-VT) advanced a bill that would require the Food and Drug Administration to put warning labels on ultraprocessed foods and restrict junk food advertising. Senate Health, Education, Labor, and Pensions Committee Chairman Bill Cassidy (R-LA) praised the bipartisanship of the committee working to advance the bills to the full Senate for consideration almost unanimously.“When people say that Congress is not functioning well, this committee had a long morning because we are functioning well, and we’ve taken stuff from people who are off committee and on committee, and in a considered way brought good things that make our country’s life better,” Cassidy said. Here are some of the key pieces of legislation to watch as they now progress to the full Senate.Hospital price transparency One bill, written by Sens. Roger Marshall (R-KS) and John Hickenlooper (D-CO), the Patients Deserve Price Tags Act, would require hospitals to clearly communicate their negotiated prices to patients and impose strict penalties for failing to comply. “Look, patients deserve price tags, not surprise billing,” Marshall said. “Once and for all, we’ll force transparency. transparency and competition into healthcare.”Hickenlooper said the status quo of estimated prices and limited transparency particularly hurts the 180 million Americans with employer-sponsored health insurance. “No single company in this system is a monopoly,” Hickenlooper said. “But without transparency, healthcare is an aggregated monopoly. This makes it almost impossible for people to make financially sound decisions about their health care.”Hickenlooper said the bill would generate an additional $75 billion in tax revenue and “savings and reductions of costs would be dramatically more than that.”Sen. Rand Paul (R-KY) opposed the bill because healthcare prices are fixed for those on Medicaid, Medicare, and private insurance. He argued that healthcare prices are not reflective of a true marketplace in which competition drives down prices. “I don’t want people to think that this fixes the problem,” Paul said. “When you mandate transparency on prices that are fixed, it doesn’t change the situation.”Paul was the only no vote.Insulin price caps Sens. Susan Collins (R-ME) and Jeanne Shaheen (D-NH) put forward the INSULIN Act, which would cap insulin prices at $35 per month, a proposal that has had strong bipartisan support for several years. “While recent decisions by manufacturers to cut their list prices on insulin is encouraging, there is still more work to be done,” Collins said. “Our bill would cap the cost of insulin at $35 a month for individuals who are on commercial insurance plans.”Nearly 40% of people with diabetes have rationed or skipped insulin doses due to cost, according to the American Diabetes Association. Collins said the bill was introduced without a provision to include individuals without insurance in the price cap in order to get the text before the committee for a full vote. But the committee amended the legislation to make the price cap applicable regardless of insurance status.Paul opposed the bill, citing the history of price controls in Venezuela and the Soviet Union. “I respect the intentions and motives of those who would like to see lower insulin prices in the bill, but historically price controls don’t work,” Paul said.There were four senators who voted against the bill.Cassidy, who voted for the bill, said that the bill “may need more refinement and may encounter policy and procedural hurdles” when considered by the full Senate. “I am pleased that we were able to advance it to the next stage of the legislative process,” Cassidy said.Sanders takes on childhood diabetes Sanders’s bill, the Childhood Diabetes Reduction Act, would place warning labels on foods and beverages with high sugar, saturated fat, and sodium content. It received support from several Republicans on the committee, passing by 12 to 10.“In America today, we have an obesity epidemic and a diabetes epidemic,” Sanders said. “They are both directly related, and they are both getting worse. More than 35 million Americans have type 2 diabetes, over 10% of our population.”Several Republicans, including Cassidy and Marshall, supported Sanders’s bill, citing the severity of the childhood obesity epidemic.“It’s not perfect, but sometimes you have to, we just have to do something, and this is the most significant something I can see,” Marshall said.DOCTORS SKEPTICAL OF HEGSETH’S ‘HIGH-T’ MILITARY PROGRAMPaul offered an amendment to the bill that would change the Supplemental Nutrition Assistance Program, more commonly known as food stamps, to prevent excessively sugary foods and beverages.Paul’s amendment was tabled to allow time to consult with the Agriculture Committee, which has jurisdiction over federal nutrition programs.