At age 37 while nursing her infant daughter, Kate Lundquist, a middle school teacher and mother to six kids, found a lump in her breast that turned out to be highly aggressive triple negative breast cancer. Traveling from northern Minnesota to her hometown Duluth for treatment, she went through 16 rounds of chemotherapy and multiple surgeries.
By the end of the battle, Lundquist says she “felt like a shell of herself,” but that trying to navigate the health insurance program she was enrolled in to get her the care she needed “at times felt even harder than the chemo.”
“When I could have been resting or spending time with my young children, I spent so much time on hold with my insurance company, keeping bills organized, challenging charges and coverage, and wondering why certain providers and services that I utilized were suddenly not covered,” Lundquist says.
Now, Lundquist is celebrating her seventh year cancer-free, and she’s demanding the government make changes to how sick people are being treated by their health insurance providers. She joined Dr. Paul Thurmes, a Minnesota oncologist, and DFL Sen. Amy Klobuchar at the Minnesota Oncology Maple Grove Clinic on Monday, Sep. 21, to help highlight Klobuchar’s plan to lower prescription drug costs if elected the state’s next governor.
Klobuchar is a breast cancer survivor herself. During a routine mammogram in February 2021, she was diagnosed with early stage 1 breast cancer. Klobuchar received a lumpectomy and was officially cleared of cancer later that year. She still receives routine checkups, and says she wants others to be able to access that same kind of care.
Discounting prescription drugs
The first step in Klobuchar’s plan to lower prescription drug costs, from insulin to chemotherapy, is to expand Minnesota’s bulk purchasing of drugs. And she wants to do this using a resource the state already has: MMCAP.
Our state has the largest multi-state public drug purchasing pool in the country, the Minnesota Multistate Contracting Alliance for Pharmacy (MMCAP). With over 35,000 hospitals, clinics, and facilities buying from it, MMCAP uses its collective buying power to get massive discounts on a large supply of drugs, medical supplies, and healthcare services to parse out to its customers. Klobuchar says the pool gives Minnesota “lots of leverage against Big Pharma, and leverage matters.” She says this also allows for more generic or biosimilar products and drugs to be bought and sold to Minnesotans at a lower price.
Dr. Thurmes added to this at the press conference, saying that “cancer is really a powerful lens through which to look at healthcare affordability.” He says the first thing his patients ask him is whether they will survive. Then, other questions follow. “Can I afford my treatment? Will my insurance cover it? Can I get the care I need close to home,” Thurmes shared. He says many patients are left in the dark about the financial consequences, and affordability through the 340B Drug Pricing Program for discounted care can help ease that burden.
According to the Commonwealth Fund, the 340B program “requires drug manufacturers to provide significant price discounts on outpatient drugs” bought by certain federal grantees (like hospitals and health centers that use Medicaid). This means certain hospitals can buy discounted prescription drugs while billing payers (like Medicaid) the non-discounted price, generating revenue. While MMCAP is a big player, Klobuchar says the most important part of this plan for hospitals is protecting this program.
Klobuchar says this is imperative for most rural hospitals and health clinics in Greater Minnesota who treat low-income and uninsured patients. These are the kinds of health clinics that are already struggling from lack of funding. Per her website, Klobuchar believes that the 340B program discounts “keep rural and safety net hospitals open.”
Comparing Klobuchar and Demuth’s plans
Klobuchar’s plan to keep discounted drugs a factor in lowering Minnesotans’ healthcare costs was announced in July. Her visit to the Oncology Clinic wasn’t just to highlight this plan again before the Nov. 3 election, but also to highlight the difference between her plan on the issue and her opponent’s.
Republican State Rep. Lisa Demuth is well known to the supporters of the federal 340B program due to this year’s legislative session.
In 2024, Minnesota passed a law that prohibits drug manufacturers from interfering in health systems’ access to the 340B program. This law was set to expire on July 1, 2027. During this year’s legislative session, a bipartisan group tried to repeal that 2027 end date and make this restriction permanent.
The bill passed the state Senate 42-24, with eight Republicans joining all of the Democrats. But the bill didn’t even get a vote in the House–led by Demuth–before the session ended for the year. Klobuchar says Demuth “stopped it [bill] from getting a vote in the House.”
MinnPost says Demuth “blamed DFLers for the breakdown in negotiations” during a later press conference, and that Demuth “pushed for a bill without an enforcement provision.” If elected governor, Klobuchar says she will not let the 340B program expire and will strengthen its enforcement.
Protecting access to care
Lundquist says she was “privileged” to get care under her husband’s health insurance plan. She asked if the medication and health insurance premiums need to cost so much and “need to be so complicated and conditional?” Not everyone has that access to affordable health insurance, and a lot fewer Americans do today thanks to the policies pushed by the Trump administration and supported by most Republicans.
“When I look at the Big Beautiful Bill, I’m angry…How is it in the United States of America that we have a sea of people who carry insurance but are too afraid to use it? Who need care but become financially overwhelmed?”
-Kate Lundquist, breast cancer survivor
The One Big Beautiful Bill (OBBB) will cut $1 billion from Medicaid over the next 10 years and restrict Medicaid eligibility. At the same time, Republicans failed to extend the American Care Act (ACA) tax credits to help people pay for their healthcare.
Klobuchar attacked Demuth for her support for these policies. On the talk show Hot Talk with the Ox in May, Demuth said Trump’s healthcare cuts are “good for Minnesota” and said she was “really grateful” for the Medicaid cuts in the OBBB. Klobuchar says Demuth also opposed state legislation to cap insulin costs at $25 per month, which ultimately passed in 2023.
Meanwhile, Klobuchar voted against the OBBB, supported the ACA tax credits, and was one of many to cap insulin at $35 a month nationally for seniors with Medicare. “I’m coming from a place of someone who understands that it is not fair that some people get healthcare and some people get to have access to treatments and others don’t,” Klobuchar said.
