By Amy Killelea and Christine Monahan
While recent Medicaid and marketplace coverage changes are having profound impacts on consumer affordability and coverage, they hit the millions of people living with insulin-requiring diabetes even harder. Georgetown’s Center on Health Insurance Reforms (CHIR), in collaboration with Families USA, released a resource describing the health insurance affordability and coverage challenges people with insulin-requiring diabetes are facing and the steps that policymakers, patient groups, and broader health policy stakeholders can take to mitigate these harms. Some of these challenges are longstanding features of broken insurance and regulatory systems and some are emerging as a direct result of federal policy shifts.
The resource, Leveraging Partnerships to Navigate Emerging Diabetes Coverage, Access, and Affordability Challenges, follows a convening CHIR and Families USA hosted in April 2026 focused on emerging insurance coverage and affordability challenges for people with insulin-requiring diabetes. The convening brought together individuals with deep diabetes expertise (e.g., patient groups, providers, and people living with diabetes) as well as individuals and organizations with broader health care policy and advocacy focus areas (e.g., statewide coalitions and national policy and advocacy groups). This resource lifts up some of the take-aways from the convening around three main topics:
1) Navigating coverage shifts
2) Addressing rising cost sharing, and
3) Preparing the safety net for gaps in coverage.
The resource also describes the action steps identified by participants to tackle the emerging challenges for diabetes coverage, affordability, and access.
Read the full resource here.
Scan the key takeaways and watch videos of attendees here.
Browse all our diabetes-related resources here.
