Saint Paul, Minn. – The Minnesota Senate passed HF 3001, the Alec Smith Insulin Affordability Act, with a unanimous vote today. This bill requires manufacturers to provide insulin at no cost to individuals or pharmacies for emergency access and has increased penalties on those manufacturers who fail to comply. Senator Marty’s statement follows:
“I am glad that this legislation has finally passed, and I’m grateful to the Insulin4Alladvocates who dedicated so much time and work to make this happen,” said Sen. John Marty. “However, there was no reason we could not have passed this last year, if Senate Republicans had been willing to make the pharmaceutical companies pay the costs back then. The insulin cost crisis was caused, completely caused, by pharmaceutical corporation price gouging. We should not have had to wait an extra year because some legislators were hesitant to make Pharma pay for the problem they caused.
Better late than never, this is a solid step forward to prevent more tragic deaths. Now we need to push aggressively to stop all price gouging by the pharmaceutical industry.”
The language of the bill can be found here.
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