Ensuring Marylanders can access the cures and care they need by:
Maryland's Biohealth Promise
Maryland is recognized as a national leader in biotech and biohealth innovation, home to institutions like the NIH, top research universities, and over 2,700 life sciences companies, but federal and state policies and funding cuts pose a serious threat to our research infrastructure.
Secure the Cures Maryland is committed to safeguarding Maryland's innovation economy and protecting patient access by supporting policies that promote investments, championing regulatory and fiscal policies that drive new research and economic opportunity and patient access, and ensuring that Maryland remains a home for breakthroughs that deliver life-changing cures for patients.
Promoting a robust life sciences ecosystem.
Pro-innovation, pro-growth, pro-patient.
Maryland is home to one of the nation's leading life sciences ecosystems, an innovation engine driven by federal research assets, world-class universities, and a dynamic private sector. Our thriving bio-innovation economy supports over 133,000 jobs and contributes nearly $3 billion to the state through pharmaceutical and biotech manufacturing.
From breakthrough therapies to cutting-edge manufacturing, Maryland's leadership in the BioHealth Capital Region fuels not only economic growth but also the development of treatments that improve and save lives.
As policymakers in Maryland and Washington, D.C. debate reforms that will shape the future of healthcare, protecting Maryland's innovation economy is crucial to retaining jobs, supporting local research and ensuring patients continue to benefit from new discoveries made right here at home.
Investing in Maryland
Supporting Maryland's research and development environment.
Maryland's life sciences ecosystem is built on a foundation of research and development that turns scientific discovery into real-world solutions for patients. Consistent, forward-looking investment is essential to maintaining this momentum, yet funding uncertainty and shifting policy priorities risk slowing progress across the innovation pipeline.
Decisions made at the state and federal level directly shape Maryland's ability to compete for research dollars, support public-private partnerships, and sustain the laboratories and institutions where breakthroughs begin. When R&D funding is constrained or unpredictable, discovery is limited, long-term investments are discouraged, and Maryland's position as a destination for biotech and biopharma is threatened.
Centering Patients
Putting patients at the center of affordability efforts.
Marylanders deserve real, sustainable relief from high healthcare costs, but well-intentioned healthcare policies risk doing more harm than good. From price-setting to missing insurance industry reforms, healthcare policy requires serious change to ensure that regulations do not disrupt bio-innovation or access to life-saving medicines and treatments.
On the state and federal level, drug pricing proposals, research funding cuts, and delayed reforms to the insurance industry threaten drug availability, destabilization of healthcare access in Maryland and reduced investment in research and development that our state’s economy relies upon.
Maryland deserves reforms that remove barriers to care, not policies that risk medicine shortages or weakened innovation. Real affordability solutions include meaningful reforms and protections that keep patients on the treatments that work for them.
Removing Barriers, Restoring Access
Restoring fairness, transparency, and access in the prescription drug system.
Third-party intermediaries, or middlemen, play a central role in managing prescription drug benefits and negotiating prices and oftentimes decide what medicines are covered regardless of what the patient's doctor prescribes.
Over time, consolidation has left a small number of these entities in control of most of the market, enabling them to generate outsized profits while limiting choice for patients and community pharmacies.
Targeted policy changes are vital to curb abusive pricing practices, improve transparency, and strengthen oversight. Addressing these practices is one of the most effective routes to deliver meaningful relief to Maryland's families at the pharmacy counter and beyond.
Protecting Safety Net Care
Supporting safety-net care while ensuring accountability and patient benefit.
Programs intended to help hospitals provide affordable care to low-income and uninsured patients play an important role in strengthening Maryland's health care safety net.
Thoughtful reforms that emphasize transparency, accountability, and patient-centered safeguards can help realign safety net program efforts with their original purpose. Done right, reform will preserve critical safety net services while preventing practices that contribute to higher costs for employers, taxpayers, and most importantly, Maryland's families.