Michigan retiree says the new medication price cap would have preserved her savings

In 2015, longtime Verizon employee DeAnn Roesner and her late husband decided to retire and move to Michigan. (0:46) But after his prescription drug copayments ate through their savings, she found herself having to go back to work full time.

Roesner is now a strong supporter of the Inflation Reduction Act of 2022, which capped out-of-pocket costs for Medicare Part D recipients at $35 a month for insulin and, starting in 2025, $2000 a year for prescription drugs.

Her husband received some help through Medicare Part D, but they still struggled to afford the cost of his health care. 

“He had quite a few health issues. He was an insulin-dependent diabetic, he had had a heart attack and bypass surgery. And then he also had liver cancer. So there were a lot of health issues involved…” Roesner told the Michigan Independent. “So his monthly medications alone — and the biggest part of that was insulin — his monthly medications most months cost us $1,000 a month, easily. Some months, it was even more than that, if he had something else going on or if he got something new prescribed.”

Had the $35-a-month cap been in place at the time, she said, it would have made a huge difference. “We could have easily gotten through that and come out,” Roesner said. “And I would still today have retirement leftover from Verizon.”

Instead, she was forced to come out of retirement and became a full-time teacher. “At 67, should I need to go out and start a second career, just because I used the retirement to pay for my husband’s medication?” Roesner asked. “I wouldn’t change that decision at all. I would do the exact same thing if I was going to do it again. But how many other seniors are out there now having to work or having to find a second career because they found themselves in a similar situation?”

Roesner had harsh words for former President Donald Trump and other Republican lawmakers who back rolling back the Inflation Reduction Act: “It makes me very angry. It’s easy to see that they themselves don’t have to try to purchase prescriptions like insulin using Medicare or using Social Security, or a limited income. I think that if they themselves had to go through that, or had to see their spouse suffer through that, I think they would think very, very differently.”

She also supports a proposal by House Democrats, including Reps. Debbie Dingell, Dan Kildee, Elissa Slotkin, Hillary Scholten, Haley Stevens, Shri Thanedar, and Rashida Tlaib, to extend the $35 insulin cap to private insurance companies. Michigan Democratic Sen. Gary Peters is co-sponsoring a similar bill in the Senate.

“It was bad enough for my husband at the time to be a senior on Medicare to have to struggle with that. But when I see younger people, even who are out there working hard. Teachers, for example, you know, they’re not making a lot of money, but they’re doing a great service,” Roesner said. “But yet if one of them is diabetic, they have to pay thousands of dollars a month, perhaps, like my husband did, but that’s a big chunk of their monthly paycheck going towards insulin. So how are they also supposed to be able to afford a home to live in, heat, food, all those other things that they also have to pay? ”