Policies that Impact Maryland

The 340B Drug Pricing Program was established in 1992 with a noble purpose: to help patients by enabling safety-net hospitals and clinics to stretch scarce resources and provide care and affordable medications to low-income, vulnerable and uninsured patients. Unfortunately, over the decades, the program has drifted wildly off course... Read more from The Baltimore Sun.

HANCOCK, Md. — For 21 years, Ken Reed kept his pharmacy open in this small Western Maryland town, filling prescriptions for neighbors who knew the pharmacist by name and sometimes stopped in simply to ask a question about their health. Then the economics stopped making sense. Reed said some prescription drugs cost his pharmacy more to buy than insurance middlemen paid him to dispense. An insulin prescription that cost his pharmacy about $400, he said, could bring only about $

After a month hiatus, John Oliver returned to Last Week Tonight with a look at United Healthcare, the largest insurance company in the US, which served over 50 million people last year... Read more from The Guardian.

I remember what my life looked like before I found the right medication. Crohn’s disease had stolen years from me, piece by piece. I spent more time managing my disease than with my family. I couldn’t trust my body to get me through a workday. After years of suffering, failed treatments, unwanted medication side effects and insurance denials, I worked with my doctor to find a treatment that was right for me. Within months, I was in remission. For the first time in years, I fe

Starting a business should not mean gambling with your family’s health. Yet for millions of entrepreneurs, it increasingly does.Nearly 1 in 5 small-business owners and self-employed workers rely on the Affordable Care Act marketplaces for insurance. They just got the awful news that exchange plan premiums will likely jump 15% in 2027, the second consecutive year of double-digit increases. Those hikes could stop new businesses before they start, as would-be entrepreneurs concl

As policymakers in Washington take a closer look at the 340B program and debate reforms to improve transparency and accountability, one thing has become increasingly clear: Questions about whether the program is serving patients as intended can no longer be ignored. What began as a well-intentioned safety-net program has grown dramatically over the past three decades, attracting bipartisan scrutiny as lawmakers seek to understand whether 340B savings are reaching the patients

Congress created the 340B Drug Pricing Program in 1992 to help safety-net providers care for low-income patients by allowing qualified hospitals, clinics, and other health care organizations to purchase medicines at discounted prices. These providers often serve communities facing the greatest barriers to care, including communities with high proportions of Black patients. The idea is simple and worth defending: a hospital serving patients with the greatest needs buys medicin

For more than three decades, my work has been rooted in West Baltimore, where the gap between scientific progress and community benefit is not theoretical; it is something families experience every day. That is why a recent announcement about a new treatment for metastatic pancreatic cancer demanded my attention. New clinical data shows that daraxonrasib doubled survival rate for patients with previously treated metastatic pancreatic cancer, reducing the risk of death by 60 p

Maryland and Virginia lost nearly the same number of federal workers during the Trump administration’s cuts to the federal workforce last year. But one state’s economy appears to be responding very differently... Read more at the Baltimore Sun.

American voters desperately want relief from rising prices — especially the increasingly unaffordable cost of healthcare. Democrats have a plan for that. Massachusetts Sen. Elizabeth Warren recently introduced the Break Up Big Medicine Act with Sen. Josh Hawley, R-Mo., a bill that would split up the huge conglomerates that have made the current healthcare system so expensive and frustrating to navigate. Businessman Mark Cuban recently quipped that breaking up these near-monop

Maryland is seeing more people than usual drop out of ACA health care plans after the first quarter after federal subsidies were allowed to sunset by Congress. The state saw an 8% disenrollment rate from people unable to pay for their ACA health care plans from January to the end of March, which translates to about 18,000 residents. Read more at WYPR.

State officials determined that Ozempic, a popular diabetes treatment and weight-loss drug, is unaffordable for Marylanders and voted Monday to limit how much state and local governments will pay for it on state health plans... Read more at Maryland Matters.

Gov. Abigail Spanberger on Tuesday vetoed legislation that would have created a state board to review prescription drug costs, saying that evidence from other states shows that such boards do not achieve the goal of lower prices... Read more from Cardinal News.

Legislation signed by Maryland Gov. Wes Moore (D) would de-couple the state from following the recommendations of a federal vaccine advisory panel that was remade by Health Secretary Robert F. Kennedy Jr. The Vax Act, signed by Gov. Wes Moore (D) Tuesday, directs the state’s health secretary to issue official recommendations for immunizations, screening and preventive services, rather than relying on the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention’s Advisory Committee on Immu

AbbVie Inc., Novartis AG, AstraZeneca Plc, and drug industry group PhRMA notched a victory Tuesday after a federal appeals court vacated an order rejecting their request to block a Maryland drug discount law, remanding the decision for review. The US Court of Appeals for the Fourth Circuit ruled a lower court “erred” when it denied the drugmakers and the Pharmaceutical Research and Manufacturers of America’s motion for a preliminary injunction against Maryland’s H.B. 1056.

Medical breakthroughs are often measured in lives saved and diseases prevented. That is only part of the story. They are also a powerful driver of economic growth, workforce strength, and long-term public revenue. For communities like Frederick County, that connection is not theoretical. It is visible in our local economy every day... Read more from Rick Weldon, CEO of the Frederick County Chamber of Commerce, at The Frederick News Post .

Maryland’s small businesses and independent pharmacies are the backbone of our communities, yet they are being squeezed by a prescription-drug system that rewards powerful middlemen over the very people it is meant to serve. Pharmacy Benefit Managers (PBMs) and the insurance giants that own them dictate prices, reimbursement and access with almost no transparency, driving up costs for employers and threatening the survival of local pharmacies... Read more from Liz League, CEO

Right now, the U.S. is drifting toward a dangerous dependency. America relies on China for a significant share of the raw ingredients used to manufacture medicines — sometimes as much as 80 to 90 percent of active pharmaceutical ingredients. Meanwhile, 477 FDA-registered drug manufacturing facilities operate in China, yet the FDA inspected only 204 foreign drug and device establishments in fiscal 2024... Read more from The Hill .

Last summer, Lorena Alvarado Hill received a series of unexpected medical bills. A teacher’s aide in Melbourne, Florida, Hill is a single mom who works shifts at J.Crew on the weekends to send her daughter to college. Hill and her mother, who lives with her, had been enrolled in an insurance plan through HealthFirst. Hill paid nothing toward the premiums for the government-subsidized plan, which previously had covered her scans and other appointments. Read more at KFF Health

The program was meant to help hospitals provide for poor patients by offering drug savings. But critics say a Texas company has turned it into a big business, driving up costs for patients and insurers. Read more at NYT .