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.

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.

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.

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 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...

For a long time, I thought advocacy meant surviving the next appointment. I thought it meant learning how to explain my pain better, how to prepare for another referral visit, how to justify why I...

Editor's Note: This article was originally published on April 10, 2026, by Lupus Colorado and is republished here with permission. The Patient Affordability Roundtable discussed in this piece was...

Public health programs like 340B are designed with a clear and urgent purpose: to improve community health, expand access to care, and protect the most vulnerable among us. Whether it’s ensuring...

New Phase 3 data show a single-tablet regimen of bictegravir/lenacapavir could finally bring one-pill simplicity to long-term HIV survivors locked into complex regimens by decades of drug resistance. The science is closing the treatment gap. Will our policy systems do the same?

States are rationing HIV medications through prior auth and formulary cuts to solve ADAP budget crises — a strategy that costs more, drives resistance, and concentrates harm on the most vulnerable.

Rising employer premiums averaging 9.5% erode wages, forcing workers to delay care.

Break Up Big Medicine Act would force structural separation of insurers, PBMs, and pharmacies.

Medicare drug negotiation's third wave includes Biktarvy, raising HIV treatment access concerns.

Q1 2026 Watch: HCV/HIV co-infection treatment access under evolving federal and state policies.

340B program drifted from patient benefit; federal reform needed for transparency and accountability.

Enhanced ACA subsidies expired Jan 1; Senate framework proposes two-year extension with restrictions.