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.

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.

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...

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.

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

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.

World AIDS Day honors resilience of HIV advocates and communities resisting policy failures and system barriers to care.

Personal narrative on becoming an HIV advocate and the gratitude found in fighting for healthcare access from lived experience.

Senate HELP Committee hearing reveals how 340B drug program expansion reflects hospital business strategy rather than patient benefit.

Q4 2025 Watch monitoring HCV treatment access and federal initiatives including Cure Hepatitis C Act.