Bernie Sanders on healthcare: what the evidence says · JRE #1330
“We bought insulin in Windsor, Ontario for one tenth the price, 10% of the price, same exact product being charged in America.”
What the evidence says
Sanders is describing a July 2019 event in which he led a group of Type 1 diabetics from the U.S. to a pharmacy in Windsor, Ontario to buy insulin, at the time citing a roughly $340 U.S. price against roughly $30-$32 in Canada for a comparable vial, close to a ten-to-one ratio for that specific purchase. Government-commissioned research supports the same direction but a smaller average gap: an ASPE (HHS)-funded RAND analysis of 2022 IQVIA pricing data found average U.S. gross insulin prices were more than six times prices in Canada specifically, while the study's 'nearly ten times' figure compares the U.S. average to 33 OECD countries combined, not Canada alone. A prior version using 2018 data found U.S. prices roughly 6.3 times Canada's. The direction of Sanders' claim, that identical insulin is dramatically cheaper in Canada, is well supported, and his specific single-purchase anecdote of a roughly tenfold difference is plausible for that transaction. But generalizing 'one tenth the price' as the typical U.S.-Canada gap overstates the government's own average figure, which is closer to a sixfold difference.