Insulin is way too expensive. California has a solution: Make its own

> because of the Senate’s arcane rules, they could not establish the same cap for private insurance

It looks like one party tried to get this done in reconciliation. If so, blaming “arcane rules” is slanted and makes me wonder what other information the author is twisting.

> The state is taking a two-phase approach. In the short term, California has put out a request for proposals from existing enterprises that could produce generic insulin for the state as a subcontractor in the next few years in order to try to deliver relief as soon as possible.

[...]

> But in the long term, the plan is for a government factory operated by government workers producing government-owned medication. The state would have its own public production facilities, staffed by civil workers, which would sell generic insulin for the same cost needed to produce it, plus perhaps a small percentage to cover auxiliary costs for the program.

> The $100 million in funding is split evenly between the short and long term. But that long-term vision will take time. Even if the state were to retrofit an existing factory for insulin production, that construction work could take years, as would hiring a workforce to oversee it. Once production is up and running, California would need to hit more targets — most importantly producing a product that the FDA says is interchangeable with existing insulin medications.

That second phase is certainly ambitious. Putting it out for bid would be the more normal government process. It will be interesting to see what happens.

Perhaps the drug cartels should get involved.

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The rules of reconciliation are indeed arcane. There is a Senate Parliamentarian who makes calls on interpretations because the details are so convoluted.

Sure, at a high level it's simple. But so is "crawl the internet, make a database and match keywords from requests to a ranked list of results."