Medical students at public universities, organized with Students for a National Health Program, traveled up to Tallahassee on Thursday to advocate for proposals sponsored by Florida Democrats this session that would cap insulin co-pay costs at $35 per month, establish a task force to study the feasibility of a universal statewide health insurance program, and get Florida on the path towards creating one.
Both proposals this year are sponsored by Orlando’s Democratic Sen. Carlos Guillermo Smith and Rep. Marie Woodson, a Democrat in South Florida.
“I find myself in medical school and kind of on the front lines of just seeing the, I don’t know, the inefficiencies, the inequities, all of the ‘in’-words that you can think of, as far as American healthcare system goes,” Artenisa Kulla, a 26-year-old medical student from St. Petersburg, explained in an interview with Orlando Weekly.
Kulla, an immigrant from Albania who moved to Florida with her family as a child, is one of roughly 30 to 40 medical students, physicians, pre-med students, and other community stakeholders in Florida joining state legislators up in Tallahassee this week, specifically to meet with them and explain their support for Woodson and Smith’s proposals.
As a medical student, Kulla said she recognizes the “immense privilege” she has in her professional capacity as a healthcare provider.
“You put on the white coat and everybody listens to you, so why not take this opportunity to use this power that we’ve been given for good, and to not be apolitical about it, when standing and being silent has not really made anything better for our patients?”
‘You put on the white coat and everybody listens to you, so why not take this opportunity to use this power that we’ve been given for good?’
“The talking points that resonate, I think, are the personal stories,” said Kulla. Growing up in a blue-collar immigrant family herself, Kulla was inspired to advocate for more affordable healthcare coverage because of her dad, who developed cancer when she was a child.
Her dad’s cancer treatment pushed her family into medical debt, and prevented her dad from working, and supporting the family financially. “This young individual who had so much economic potential, all of that is destroyed because he is now having to deal with, like medical debt,” Kulla shared. “And he was out of work for an entire year because he couldn’t — obviously, from all of his cancer care — couldn’t go and work construction the way that he used to.”
An estimated 2.5 million people in Florida — or roughly 11 percent of the population — lack health insurance. Florida is one of just 10 states nationwide that hasn’t expanded its public Medicaid program, a move that would help hundreds of thousands of uninsured Floridians access coverage.
“The overarching message that we are trying to deliver is that healthcare should absolutely be a priority in the state of Florida,” said Pritom Karmaker, a first-year medical student from Melbourne who now goes to school in South Florida. A graduate of UCF, Karmaker also traveled up to Tallahassee this week to advocate, for the first time, with SNHP.
Capping insulin costs
Insulin is a life-saving medicine for people with diabetes, especially Type 1. Unfortunately, it can also be cost-prohibitive, forcing diabetics with fewer financial resources to ration their insulin, placing their health — and life — at risk.
Under legislation filed by Smith and Woodson, all private health insurance policies would be barred from charging more than a $35 copay or cost-sharing requirement for a 30-day supply of insulin, non-insulin, or other blood sugar regulation drug for diabetes management. The cap, if approved, would apply to all policies renewed or issued on or after Jan. 1, 2026.
According to the American Diabetes Association, at least 25 states and the District of Columbia have capped insulin costs to some extent. In the red state of Alabama, insulin costs are capped at $100 for a 30-day supply. Eighteen states, including red states like Louisiana and Texas, have capped monthly copay costs to $35 or less.
The cost of insulin is 10 times higher in the U.S. than any other developed country
The federal Inflation Reduction Act of 2022, signed into law by President Joe Biden, similarly adopted a $35 insulin cap, specifically for people enrolled in Medicare plans. Biden had proposed the idea of extending this to people with commercial insurance, but didn’t follow through.
According to the Florida Health Insurance Advisory Board, which supports an insulin cap, the cost of insulin is 10 times higher in the U.S. than any other developed country “and creates an enormous financial burden on Floridians who cannot survive without it.”
The board, first established by the Florida Legislature in 1992, noted in a recent letter to Florida Insurance Commissioner Michael Yaworsky that making insulin more affordable could help prevent more costly health emergencies down the road.
“We have all heard heartbreaking stories,” the board writes. “While there is no high cost of development to insulin and innovation is limited, there is also no “free” market where market forces would drive down the cost to consumers.”
A ‘Medicare for All’ proposal in Florida
The idea of a universal or single-payer healthcare system gained greater notoriety during the 2016 presidential election cycle, thanks to democratic socialist Bernie Sanders, who pitched the idea as part of his presidential platform. But the idea was first proposed on a federal level decades ago and has even been proposed in the Florida Legislature before, too.
In the mid-1990s, Florida healthcare advocates even pushed to get a single-payer proposal on the statewide ballot, so voters could have a say on the issue. “All persons shall have a right to comprehensive health care services from the health care provider of their choice in a single payer health care system,” a summary for the initiative read.
Although it managed to gain some news coverage, the proposal never made it onto the ballot. In 2021, Republicans even tried, unsuccessfully, to prevent a similar proposal from ever reaching the ballot again.
Under Smith and Woodson’s 2025 proposal, dubbed the “Healthy Florida Act,” the state would establish a task force to recommend a design for a publicly funded, single-payer health coverage plan.
Under such a plan, the cost of most healthcare services, including medical, vision, and dental care, would be fully covered by the state, with no responsibility for copays, deductibles, or premiums. Coverage for all healthcare services currently available under Medicaid, Medicare, and other publicly funded healthcare plans would be preserved.
Although a full cost estimate for such a plan is unclear at this point, the legislation allocates $1.17 million for the first fiscal year of the act’s implementation — just a sliver of the nearly $20 million Gov. DeSantis is estimated to have spent fighting last year’s abortion and marijuana-related ballot measures, or the $12 million state legislators allocated for DeSantis’s harshly criticized migrant relocation program in 2022.
Core values of the healthcare proposal include “[r]emoving cost as a barrier to healthcare” and “removing any financial incentive for a healthcare practitioner to provide care to one patient over another.”
Karmaker, the med student from South Florida, believes that making healthcare more accessible would help people access the care they need before they find themselves in a health emergency. “There’s a lot of issues that can be prevented, a lot of complications that people suffer from — diseases — that they shouldn’t have to suffer from,” he said. “And that takes the toll not just on the healthcare system as a whole, but on the population of people that live here.”
Advocates point to examples in other states, like Oregon’s Task Force on Universal Healthcare, approved by state legislators in 2019. Attempts to establish universal healthcare plans have also been seen in states like California, Maryland, New York, and Illinois.
Not a priority
Capping insulin costs, and healthcare affordability proposals more broadly,however, haven’t necessarily been identified as priorities this legislative session.
Florida Gov. DeSantis, for his part, has called for changes to Florida’s ballot initiative process, to make it harder for voters to approve constitutional amendments. Florida House and Senate leaders, meanwhile, are looking to spur a ‘rural renaissance,’ explore property insurance reforms (if homeowners are lucky), and Make Condos Affordable Again. A potentially unconstitutional effort to undermine Florida’s minimum wage requirements, as well as a host of other initiatives, are also on the agenda.
Both bills, to cap insulin costs and create a universal health coverage plan in Florida, have been filed in some iteration before. But in Florida’s GOP-controlled legislature, and a political environment where business groups that oppose such proposals have much more influence, neither has ever made it very far.
The Associated Industries of Florida — a business group and generous donor to Florida Republicans — explicitly opposes the creation of a universal or single-payer health insurance system.
Efforts to cap insulin costs, at least nationally, have been more bipartisan, but have similarly stalled in the Florida Legislature. A 2022 bill (SB 678) aiming to cap costs at $100 for a 30-day supply of insulin, for instance, died without receiving a single hearing.
“This is something that isn’t going to happen overnight,” Karmaker admitted. “Our healthcare system is deeply, deeply flawed on many different levels, and that it’s going to take a lot of work from a lot of different people over who knows how much time until our healthcare system is vastly improved.”
“This might be a lifelong endeavor,” he added, “but I’m convinced that this is the right thing to fight for, and that eventually, that dream will be realized one day.”
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This article appears in Mar 19-25, 2025.
