Biden and Trump's back-and-forth on insulin fails to address the sky-high cost of health care

During Thursday night’s debate, President Joe Biden and former President Donald Trump spent a considerable amount of time trying to claim credit for lowering the high cost of insulin.

But the back and forth over insulin prices failed to address the underlying issue that many Americans fret over: the exorbitant cost of health care.

“The United States has a health care affordability crisis and this stark fact was utterly absent from the presidential debate,” said Lawrence Gostin, director of the O’Neill Institute for National and Global Health Law at Georgetown University.

A February poll by KFF, a nonprofit group that researchers health policy issues, found that unexpected medical bills and the cost of health care are at the top of the list of peoples’ financial worries, with about three-quarters of the public saying they’re at least somewhat worried about being able to afford unexpected medical bills or the cost of health care for themselves and their families.

“It was a huge swing and a miss,” Drew Altman, the president and CEO of KFF, said of the debate. “There was no meaningful attention to health care and, more importantly, to health care costs, which is absolutely an issue of major concern for voters.”

People in the U.S. pay roughly twice as much for health care than any other nation on earth, Gostin said, and yet the country's health outcomes are inferior to most peer nations.

What's more, health care costs continue to rise in America.

National health care spending — which includes spending on physicians, services from hospitals, and prescription drug costs — is projected to grow to almost $4.8 trillion in 2023, increasing faster than the projected growth of the overall economy, according to a report published