It’s Time for a Diabetes Moonshot
By Prerna Jagadeesh
During his final State of the Union address in 2016, President Obama tasked then-Vice-President Joe Biden with a monumental challenge: putting together a Cancer Moonshot. Biden’s Cancer Moonshot was intended to make ten years’ worth of progress on eradicating cancer in five years’ time, helping to “end cancer as we know it.” When Biden took on this initiative, it was universally applauded; cancer is responsible for 20 percent of annual American deaths and an unimaginable amount of human suffering. But there’s another illness in desperate need of a moonshot, that similarly wreaks havoc on millions of American lives and is just as far from being permanently eradicated: diabetes.
13 percent of American adults have diabetes — it’s the 7th leading cause of death in America, responsible for killing more Americans than AIDS and breast cancer combined. Moreover, treatment for both Type 1 and Type 2 diabetes is slipping further and further out of the reach of middle-class Americans, just like cancer. Pharmaceutical companies have stratospherically increased the price of prescription medications for diabetes: various different versions of insulin, a drug that helps regulate both Type 1 and Type 2 diabetes, have increased in cost anywhere from 353% to 1200% over the last two decades.
Given the prevalence of diabetes, and how expensive it is to secure treatment for it, it’s no surprise that pursuing a diabetes moonshot is extremely popular with voters. In a national survey by Data for Progress, we found that federal investments in research and innovation for diabetes treatments are staggeringly popular: 82% of all voters support a diabetes moonshot, with a 71-point-margin of support.
A Diabetes Moonshot would entail three major components: funding and supporting more research and development into diabetes treatments, doing more to ensure diabetes prevention, and making treatments for diabetes truly accessible and affordable. Notably, we find support for a proposal to make diabetes treatments more available to treatments and improve the ability to prevent diabetes transcends bipartisanship: 79% of Republicans and 82% of Independents support it, in addition to 85% of Democrats. For a president so focused on bipartisanship, implementing a diabetes moonshot is an initiative that would generate political capital while saving millions of lives.
A key obstacle in many diabetics’ ability to be diagnosed with prediabetes early in the course of their illness is that there simply are not enough endocrinologists and primary care physicians to provide Americans the care they need. Biden can solve this problem — and also fortify our health care system across the board — by making a sustained investment in expanding the health care workforce, as Data for Progress previously outlined in our report on creating a public infrastructure for care. Establishing a community health corps, creating free tuition programs for doctors planning to serve the general public, and enabling doctors who trained abroad to practice in the U.S. are all steps that will go a long way towards nipping not just diabetes in the bud, but a host of other maladies too.
The main focus of a Diabetes Moonshot, as with Biden’s Cancer Moonshot, should be making treatments more affordable to the American people. A significant cause of American cancer deaths is the sky-high cost of pharmaceutical drugs used to treat cancer, a problem caused by insufficient economic regulation of pharmaceutical companies. The same problem defines our national diabetes epidemic. With the aid of government incentive programs and subsidies, and a heavy dose of marketing, corporations like Eli Lilly and Sanofi have been able to crowd out competition that might compel them to lower insulin prices — enabling them to set their own astronomical prices for insulin.
By mounting a Diabetes Moonshot, Biden can and should focus on the low-hanging fruit: making all pharmaceutical drugs more affordable, which will make a huge dent in the number of diabetes deaths and help people suffering from hundreds of other illnesses too. Americans are more than ready for the government to regulate Big Pharma more stringently: new polling by Data for Progress and Social Security Works finds that an overwhelming 77 percent of voters support allowing Medicare to negotiate the cost of prescription drugs like insulin to lower prices. Support for this measure is bipartisan: 67 percent of Republicans support it, along with 77 percent of Independents and 84 percent of Democrats. If Biden were to push for Congress to enable Medicare to negotiate prescription costs, he would radically transform American public health across the board, not just with regard to diabetes.
As Joe Biden understands better than many people in Washington, the impediment to improving people’s lives through policy often isn’t a lack of knowledge or innovation, but rather a lack of organization and political will. Biden has just achieved the incomprehensible milestone of getting over 300 million coronavirus shots in arms in less than six months, making the full-scale mobilization of government and industry that it took to do so look like a cinch. Following it up with putting an end to diabetes deaths — another public health win — would be a major victory for the Biden Administration and the American people, is firmly within the realm of Biden and Congressional Democrats’ powers to accomplish, and is a policy Americans are overwhelmingly in favor of.
Prerna Jagadeesh (@PrernaJagadeesh) is a writer at Data for Progress.
Methodology:
From April 7 to 9, 2021, Data for Progress conducted a survey of 1,251 likely voters nationally using web panel respondents. The sample was weighted to be representative of likely voters by age, gender, education, race, and voting history. The survey was conducted in English. The margin of error is ±3 percentage points.