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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

Vanda Pharmaceuticals Inc. (NASDAQ: VNDA) has landed another regulatory approval, this time for a schizophrenia and bipolar treatment - two months after securing a nod to take a motion sickness medication to market... Read more at WBJ .

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 .

Across the country, pharmacies are closing at a rapid pace, and advocates are warning it’s a serious life-or-death situation. “We’re starting to see that there's not only issues with access but also issues with the chronic diseases, people [in] emergency rooms, people get sicker and people really dying if we're going to be blunt about it,” said Magaly Rodriguez de Bittner, associate dean at the University of Maryland School of Pharmacy... Read the full article at WMAR 2 .

Maryland is becoming the home away from home for British drugmaker AstraZeneca. On Friday, the biopharma powerhouse upped its ante in the Old Line State, saying it will invest $2 billion to increase its manufacturing presence there. The funding will allow AZ to nearly double the production capacity at its flagship biologics plant in Federick, Maryland, and also provide for the manufacture of the company's rare disease products there for the first time, AZ said. Read the full

Gov. Wes Moore wants state-level guidance to bigfoot the new federal vaccine recommendations, which do not universally include flu and other infectious diseases. Moore said Thursday he intends to seek state legislation during the upcoming General Assembly session that would give Maryland’s health secretary more authority over vaccine guidance that is used by parents, doctors and insurers who pay for the shots. Read more at the Baltimore Banner .

For decades, America has led the global biotech industry – thanks, in part, to state-level policies that encourage research and manufacturing investments. But other countries, including China, are sparing no expense in the bid to overtake us. Beijing has officially made biotechnology a national strategic priority and is pouring billions into state-backed research and manufacturing efforts. Read more at Real Clear Health .

Federal health officials on Monday announced dramatic revisions to the slate of vaccines recommended for American children, reducing the number of diseases prevented by routine shots to 11 from 17. Jim O'Neill, acting director for the Centers of Disease Control and Prevention, has updated the agency's immunization schedule to reflect the changes, effective immediately, officials said at a news briefing. Read more at the .

Samsung Biologics, the largest biotechnology company in South Korea, has announced plans to establish its first U.S. manufacturing facility in Rockville. The announcement is a follow up to meetings held earlier this year between Governor Moore, Maryland Commerce Secretary Harry Coker, and Samsung Biologics leadership during the governor's international trade and investment mission to Japan and South Korea. Read more at Business.Maryland.Gov

In every therapeutic journey, there is a moment when the science becomes something more than a concept. It becomes a possibility. That moment doesn’t happen by accident. It happens because a trusted partner knows how to take a company’s vision, protect it, scale it, and move it toward the patient with purpose. In the BioHealth Capital Region, few organizations embody this better than ABL; a CDMO that has built a reputation for doing things differently. ABL’s approach is roote

Korean biotechnology company, Nature Cell, is planning to open a stem cell facility in Baltimore, bringing 500 new jobs, the governor announced Tuesday. The 100,000 square foot manufacturing facility will be located at 1401 Severn Street in the mixed-use Gaslight Square complex. The facility will be completed by 2031 in two phases, according to the governor's office. Read the full article on CBS News .

If Americans want to pay less for prescription drugs, there is no way to do it without reforming the Pharmacy Benefit Manager industry. Congress should do so by the end of this year. The PBMs, once known for reducing drug costs, no longer exist. Literally, they are no longer independent companies. They sit inside the insurance giants that own them. Cash machines to help health conglomerates hit quarterly numbers. Read the full article at DC Journal .

A new Health Affairs study has confirmed that UnitedHealth Group — the nation’s largest health care conglomerate — is doing more than dominating the market; it’s playing by a different set of rules. Researchers Daniel Arnold of Brown University and Brent Fulton of UC Berkeley analyzed new federal “Transparency in Coverage” data and found that UnitedHealth’s insurance arm, UnitedHealthcare, pays its own Optum physicians 17% more on average than it pays other doctors for the

More than half of American adults manage multiple chronic conditions. The prevalence is enough to strain the U.S. healthcare system and challenge patient access to new treatments. To compound the issue, pharmacy benefit managers (PBMs) and others siphon nearly half of every dollar spent on brand-name drugs, driving up costs for patients. Read the full article on the Partnership to Fight Chronic Disease .

The conclusion of the longest government shutdown in history and rising political acrimony rightly receives a great deal of attention but this focus makes it easy to overlook areas where beneficial legislation is politically possible. The broad political agreement that it is necessary to reform how pharmacy benefit managers (PBM) operate exemplifies the potential bipartisan opportunities. Read the full article on Forbes .

Although for patients the outcome of both conflicts is the same — confusion about coverage and care access — the disputes at the center of each is different. The insurer’s dispute with CWC is a familiar story — the women’s healthcare provider wants payment increases for services under commercial, Medicaid, and Medicare Advantage plans. Allegations of inadequate reimbursements have been at the center of contract disputes between payers and providers for years, with providers

In its first report on the 340B drug discount program’s effect on the budget, the Congressional Budget Office revealed that a previously obscure federal program originally meant to help a few dozen safety-net hospitals has exploded into a multibillion-dollar subsidy for thousands of nonprofit hospitals, driving up healthcare costs for patients — burdening taxpayers and contributing to the federal deficit — while delivering little measurable benefit to patients in need. Read

Maryland’s low-income taxpayers are required to utilize for- profit pharmacies in Hawaii and California. Pharmacy Benefit Management (PBM) owned and chain drug store contract pharmacies benefit from a federal program intended to support low-income Maryland taxpayers. Read the full report on the Pioneer Institute .

The 340B Drug Pricing Program was created to provide safety-net providers (known as covered entities) access to discounted outpatient drugs. However, 340B has evolved from a modestly sized program to the second-largest drug-purchasing program in the U.S., with drug purchases totaling $66.3 billion in 2023. Read the full report at the USC Leonard D. Schaeffer Institute for Public Policy & Government Service .

The 340B Drug Pricing Program is a federal program in which manufacturers provide heavily discounted drugs to qualifying hospitals and clinics. Despite claims by its advocates that it is “free”, it increases healthcare costs for employers and their workers due to lost drug reabates. New research has estimated the financial impact of the 340B program on each state. Read the full report on IQVIA .