Latest Articles and Analysis

Prescription Drug Affordability Boards have been marketed as an easy fix for drug costs — but after six years, $28 million spent, and 394 hours of meetings, not a single PDAB has delivered savings for patients or their states. The data demands accountability.

When public employers adopt alternative funding programs to cut specialty drug costs, they don't erase the bill — they move it to ADAPs and Ryan White, the safety-net programs built for people who have no coverage at all. Workers living with HIV pay the difference in delay, disruption, and risk.

For the first time, federal rules forced insurers to publish prior authorization metrics—and the numbers confirm what patients have long experienced: denials are common, reversals are frequent, and almost no one fights back. The data opens the black box partway. It does not dismantle the barrier inside.

Congenital syphilis has risen for 12 consecutive years — not because we lack a cure, but because the only approved treatment is in shortage, coverage is shrinking in the hardest-hit states, and immigration fear is keeping pregnant people away from the prenatal care where screening happens. The tools exist. The system keeps failing to deliver them.

Formulary cuts, fibrosis staging requirements making a comeback, and the near-disappearance of HCV charitable assistance programs — CANN's Q3 2026 HIV/HCV Co-Infection Watch maps a deteriorating access landscape for people living with HIV/HCV co-infection.

The HIV/HCV Co-Infection Watch is a project of the Community Access National Network (CANN) designed to research, monitor, and report on HIV and Hepatitis C (HCV) co-infection in the United States....

Most people who received an HIV diagnosis had already been sitting in a provider's office in the year before — and left without a test or a PrEP conversation. CDC's SHIELD study maps exactly where the healthcare system had contact and did nothing with it, and the fixes are specific enough to act on now.

Congress has introduced the most ambitious federal hepatitis C elimination bill in a generation — $9.8 billion, no cost-sharing, and a delivery investment long overdue. The procurement model at its center could undermine the access it promises.

Prescription Drug Affordability Boards are operating in states across the country, but their primary tool — Upper Payment Limits — threatens pharmacies, Medicaid programs, and the patients they're supposed to help. The evidence is mounting that UPLs are the wrong solution to a real problem.

More than half of people living with HIV in the U.S. are now 50 or older—a public health success that demands more than good referral networks. Building HIV-inclusive aging organizations means developing real capacity before someone ever needs to be sent somewhere else.

A new Senate bill would require 340B hospitals to document where their savings go and, for the first time, mandate direct discounts for low-income patients at the pharmacy counter. Here's what the proposal contains and why the stakes are high for the communities 340B was built to serve.

For the first time, a finite course of therapy has produced a functional cure for chronic hepatitis B in large-scale phase 3 trials, but the communities carrying the heaviest burden of this disease are also the least likely to be screened, diagnosed, or insured. Whether this milestone translates into population-level progress is a policy question, not a scientific one.

Nearly a year after shutting down the 988 Lifeline's LGBTQ+ youth specialized services, the administration says Press 3 will return by the end of 2026, restored under an executive order that refuses to recognize some of the young people it exists to serve. The research record shows what that costs: harm to mental health, disrupted HIV care engagement, and advocate burnout. This Pride, taking care of ourselves so we can take care of each other is a public health strategy.

A proposed OMB rule would let political appointees veto or cancel federal research grants, dismantling the peer-review system and targeting the disparate-impact analysis that maps where HIV concentrates and why. For people living with HIV, that research is the foundation of Ending the HIV Epidemic. The comment period closes July 13.

On April 24, 2026, a nurse in Ituri Province in the Democratic Republic of the Congo (DRC) developed a fever. She died three days later. Her samples were tested locally and returned negative, because...

The Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) released its National HIV Prevention and Care Objectives: 2026 Update on May 18, 2026, presenting the most recent national picture of the U.S. HIV...

On May 4, 2026, Health Secretary Robert F. Kennedy Jr. closed a daylong Make America Healthy Again (MAHA) Institute summit on mental health and overmedicalization by announcing a federal initiative...

On April 24, 2026, the Substance Abuse and Mental Health Services Administration (SAMHSA) issued a Dear Colleague letter that withdraws federal funding eligibility from fentanyl test strips, sterile...

On March 6, 2026, the Iowa Department of Health and Human Services filed a nine-page complaint in Polk County District Court alleging that NuCara Specialty Pharmacy failed to remit more than $22...

The HIV/HCV Co-Infection Watch is a project of the Community Access National Network (CANN) designed to research, monitor, and report on HIV and Hepatitis C (HCV) co-infection in the United States....