Lisa Demuth, the Minnesota House Speaker and Republican nominee for governor, wants voters to know she's fought to bring down what they pay for medicine.
"As a legislator I voted to cap insulin prices," she wrote in her answers to WCCO's election guide. She made the same claim to AARP Minnesota.
Her voting record says the opposite. The Minnesota Reformer checked: Demuth voted against capping insulin costs at least twice.
Vote one: 2019
In 2019, Minnesota lawmakers passed a health and human services budget bill that, among other things, set cost-sharing limits for prescription insulin. Demuth voted against it. It passed the House 77–51 and became law anyway.
Vote two: 2023
In 2023, Democrats finally had control of the House, the Senate and the governor's office. They passed a law capping co-pays at $25 a month for prescription drugs that treat chronic illnesses like diabetes — insulin included.
Demuth voted no, along with nearly every other Republican in the Legislature. The cap passed without them.
The one vote she's probably talking about
Demuth did vote for an insulin bill: the 2020 Alec Smith Insulin Affordability Act. It lets someone who's run out get a one-time, emergency 30-day supply of insulin for $35, and it requires insulin makers to run patient-assistance programs for people who need longer-term help. It does not cap co-pays.
That law exists because of a tragedy. Alec Smith was 26 years old when he aged off his parents' health insurance. His insulin and supplies cost about $1,300 a month. He started rationing it, and he died in 2017. His family spent years lobbying the Legislature for help.
The bill's chief author, Rep. Mike Howard, told the Reformer that the original version included a cap on insulin co-pays — the kind of cap Demuth now takes credit for. Republicans, who controlled the state Senate in 2020, wouldn't pass it with the cap in it. So it came out. The emergency supply was the compromise.
It's unclear whether her claim refers to that 2020 vote. Demuth's campaign didn't respond to the Reformer's request for comment.
Howard says calling that a vote to cap insulin prices is misleading, because that's not what a normal person thinks it means. "It's pretty disingenuous when your entire legislative record is on the side of Big Pharma and big insurance companies that are amassing large profits," he said.
The insulin lobbyist advising her campaign
There's another part of this story.
Howard told the Reformer he spent years negotiating with the three drug companies that make the vast majority of the nation's insulin: Eli Lilly, Sanofi and Novo Nordisk. One lobbyist he met with was Ben Golnik, whose largest client is Novo Nordisk. Howard believes the insulin cap would have passed earlier if the drug companies hadn't fought it.
Golnik is now a top adviser to Demuth's campaign for governor — working for her without taking a campaign paycheck, the Reformer has reported.
So the candidate who voted against Minnesota's insulin caps, and who now claims she voted for one, is being advised by a lobbyist for one of the companies that sells the insulin.
Who pays
Insulin isn't a luxury. For people with type 1 diabetes, it's what keeps them alive, and Alec Smith's story is what happens when people can't afford it. Every year that a cap is blocked is a year that Minnesotans with diabetes pay more — or ration, like he did.
This isn't the first time Demuth's record has had big money behind it. A billionaire who funds abortion bans is bankrolling her run for governor.
What the record shows
Lisa Demuth tells voters, "As a legislator I voted to cap insulin prices." She voted against limits on insulin costs in 2019 and against Minnesota's $25 monthly co-pay cap in 2023; the insulin bill she backed, in 2020, offers an emergency supply and manufacturer assistance, not a co-pay cap — and its author says Republicans refused to pass it with a co-pay cap in it. A lobbyist whose largest client is insulin maker Novo Nordisk is a top adviser to her campaign.
