Policies that Impact Maryland

Today, 63 million Americans — one in four adults — provide care to a loved one living with age-related decline, disability or serious illness like cancer or heart disease. For these caregivers, reliable access to innovative medicines often marks the line between stability and crisis. Unfortunately, that access is now threatened by Washington’s latest drug pricing proposal: the so-called “Most Favored Nation” model. Read the full article on The Well News .

I often tell my American friends that they need not speculate about the effects of price controls on medicines. All they must do is ask us Europeans. If long wait times for care, diminished access to prescription medications, and less medical innovation sound good, price controls are the way to go. Read the full article at RealClear Health .

MFN pricing policies pose a significant threat to U.S. innovation, economic growth, and patient access by undermining research incentives, delaying life-saving treatments, and jeopardizing millions of high-skilled jobs. Read the full article at the U.S. Chamber of Commerce .

Where given the authority, PDABs attempt to address affordability challenges by creating and imposing a UPL for drugs deemed “unaffordable” . However, physicians surveyed believe UPLs will limit access to drugs patients rely on and for whom therapeutic alternatives are clinically inappropriate. Physicians who participated in this study communicated their concern with respect to the impact UPLs will have on providers’ prescribing habits, including the avoidance of prescribing

For years, states have implemented various legislative and regulatory policies to lower prescription drug costs in an effort to improve affordability. The first wave was pharmacy benefit management (PBM) transparency rules theorizing that greater transparency would promote comparative shopping to reduce prices. Then, the second wave focused on manufacturer price transparency reporting requirements. Legislators believed that requiring manufacturers to report and justify price

Six years ago, Maryland made national headlines by creating the first-ever Prescription Drug Affordability Board (PDAB). It was heralded as a groundbreaking step to make prescription drugs more affordable and give families some breathing room at the pharmacy counter. But today, the results are impossible to ignore — and deeply disappointing. Despite all the promises, the PDAB hasn’t lowered a single prescription cost. Not one. Instead, it risks adding more red tape and fewer