RealClearHealth Articles

These days, policymakers in both parties are increasingly ignoring the tradeoffs that come with government price controls on medicines. The Inflation Reduction Act has already led to dozens of canceled biotech research projects, and Congress is now deliberating on further government price-setting through "Most Favored Nation" policies. Patent rights lose their value under price controls. The purpose of patents is to protect innovators from early price competition by companies that did not undertake the costly research and development required to bring a drug to market. Lawmakers unfamiliar...

While debate over President Trump’s “Great Healthcare Plan” has focused heavily on the Most Favored Nation (MFN) drug pricing policy, another provision with additional and real potential to quickly lower costs has received far less attention: expanding access to over the counter (OTC) medicines. Allowing more medications to be sold without a prescription would reduce costs, expand competition increase convenience, and ease pressure on the entire healthcare system. Done properly, expanding OTC access can deliver immediate, tangible benefits to patients by making medicines...

On Tuesday, the House Ways and Means Committee will seat the chief executives of America's largest health systems and ask them to explain why health care costs keep climbing. Chairman Jason Smith and his colleagues should put a sharper question to the witnesses: what will it take to restore competition in hospital markets and affordability to American consumers? America is in the grip of a health care affordability crisis. Employer plan costs are projected to rise faster than at any point in 15 years. By 2032, the typical family could spend nearly 40 percent of household income on health...

American excellence is rooted in our nation’s ingenuity. For 250 years, the United States has been the driving force behind medical advancements and technological breakthroughs that have reshaped industries and improved lives worldwide. Our nation’s leadership in groundbreaking discoveries is no accident. It is the product of a system designed to encourage creativity, reward risk-taking, and protect the ideas that power progress. As we celebrate World Intellectual Property Day, we should be reminded of a simple truth: protecting IP is essential to both America’s innovative...

For millions of American families, health care has become a kitchen-table crisis -- not because care is unavailable, but because it is increasingly unaffordable. Premiums keep rising, deductibles are swallowing paychecks, and surprise medical bills are draining already‑thin family budgets. One little-known federal program is quietly making that affordability crisis worse despite its original intent to broaden access to affordable care. Under the 340B Drug Pricing Program, hospitals are pocketing billions in federal drug discounts -- while patients see little or no relief at the pharmacy...

The Senate HELP committee held a hearing on April 16 about “making medicines more affordable”. Policymakers find drug price controls appealing; they are straightforward to target and implement relative to solving more complex problems like access to preventive care or integrating health systems. But a better question is, does spending less on drugs - about 14% of all healthcare spending in the U.S. - equate to spending less on healthcare overall? Chronically ill patients account for over 90 percent of healthcare spending, and medicines can delay or eliminate costlier treatments....

Last December, HHS Secretary Robert F. Kennedy Jr. convened patients, clinicians, and researchers for a historic Lyme disease roundtable. He spoke personally about spending time in nature and picking ticks off himself. The Secretary lamented that the risk of Lyme disease has made the woods “hazardous across this country,” making it harder for American children to enjoy the outdoors as part of a healthier lifestyle. It was a powerful, overdue moment of recognition. And it points toward an important question: Now that Washington is paying attention, what real solutions can...

For generations, rural hospitals have been more than just places to receive medical care. They are community lifelines that provide jobs and make the difference between life and death when emergencies strike miles from the nearest city. Yet today, these essential institutions are being quietly undercut by a Medicare loophole that diverts resources meant for rural communities to large urban hospitals. At the National Grange, we advocate for the people who feed, fuel, and sustain this country. That means speaking out when policies meant to protect rural America are instead being used to weaken...

Health care affordability is polling as one of the top issues for voters this midterm election year. A key way for Congress to address that issue by encouraging health care price transparency. It’s the idea behind the Patients Deserve Price Tags Act—a comprehensive health care price transparency bill that has been steadily gaining bipartisan support in the Senate. As it stands now, the amount paid of any given medical test, procedure, drug or device can vary widely, not only between providers but also at the same hospital between different...

The Trump administration is pushing forward with a variety of measures that would cap U.S. drug prices at the artificially low levels set by other countries. It has proposed two Medicare "demonstrations" that would import these "Most Favored Nation" price controls for certain. And it's pressuring Congress to put these price controls into law.There's no question that the United States shoulders a disproportionate share of global investment in drug research and development, because other wealthy nations pay far less and effectively free-ride on U.S. medical breakthroughs.But adopting those...

Despite the rapidly increasing cost of healthcare, productivity in the industry remains stagnant. In nearly every other sector of the economy automation drives efficiency and lowers costs. In healthcare, regulators are creating roadblocks by restricting AI tools that improve diagnostic accuracy and treatment efficiency. Instead of preemptively limiting these technologies, AI should be allowed to compete with human providers and legacy systems. The United States faces a growing physician shortage. Making the existing workforce more productive is essential. That means allowing autonomous AI...

The push and pull between policymakers and bad actors are a kind of arms race: the government sees a problem, writes a new law, closes loopholes, and changes how it spends money – so the bad guys figure out how to exploit the law, find new loopholes, and keep making money. There’s nowhere where this phenomenon is more prevalent than federal health care policy, because it’s where Uncle Sam spends the most money. It’s also an industry that’s easy to exploit, because bad actors can shield their fraud and abuse behind claims that any reform will kill puppies and...

In the MAHA era of bizarre claims based on bogus science, it’s increasingly difficult to know what to believe, which products are safe, and who to tune out. It’s not just RFK Jr. inexplicably ice plunging in jeans, either. Sure, he may be the plaintiff bar’s sweetheart, a trial lawyer by trade, and made millions suing based on made-for-litigation science — but really, he just brought a long-festering issue into the mainstream. Thankfully, the Supreme Court has a chance to provide some clarity about product safety. A Missouri state court is trying to...

The U.S. Government spends upwards of a trillion dollars a year on Medicare, and a substantial portion of the Medicare budget goes toward dialysis treatment and related care for patients with late-stage kidney disease.  Since Medicare covers kidney dialysis regardless of age, and kidney disease is growing at alarming rates, the costs to the federal government are quickly becoming unsustainable.  Yet if younger people were screened, diagnosed, and treated earlier for kidney disease, Medicare could potentially see huge savings and our country would have a healthier, more productive...

The FDA’s decision to decline approval of Replimune’s treatment for advanced melanoma (RP1) raises important questions about the agency’s current regulatory posture and its alignment with long-standing principles of science-based, patient-focused decision-making. RP1 demonstrated clinically meaningful activity in a heavily pretreated population, including an overall response rate of approximately 33% and a complete response rate of 15%—outcomes that compare favorably to historical experience with PD-1 monotherapy in this setting. These data were generated in a patient...

I grew up on government assistance. In the mid 1980s we received $40 dollars a month in food stamps. Each week I made one large pot of soup that served as breakfast, lunch, and dinner. My mother was schizophrenic and in and out of hospitals and so I did the shopping and cooked those meals myself. My mother’s chronic medical needs made Medicaid essential as well. Without it what little stability we had would have been destroyed. When I got to medical school I hoped that achieving this milestone would mean I could put my childhood poverty behind me. I was wrong. Most of my classmates were...

Most of us want to believe that if a product is on a store shelf, it's been inspected properly. We want to trust that the water from our taps is clean, that our food is untainted, and that the plastic in our children's toys is harmless—partly because a federal agency has given its seal of approval. But what if these approvals aren't being made with the public's best interest at heart? A quiet, systemic betrayal has taken root in Washington. For decades, the agencies we rely on—the EPA, the FDA, and the CDC—have too often allowed regulations to be co-authored by the...

Democrats are increasingly claiming that America’s hospitals are the victims of the “largest health care cuts in history.”  Yet, the Medicaid reforms in last summer’s One Big Beautiful Bill Act (OBBB) did little to slow the program’s inexorable growth.  The hospital industry is at an unprecedented scale, and accounts for the bulk of the nation’s net job growth over the past year. House Energy and Commerce Committee Democrats argue that “hospitals and clinics are closing, workers are being laid off, patients are losing insurance coverage, and...

Across rural America, the health care crisis is no longer looming—it is here. Hospitals are closing. Pharmacies are disappearing. 911 calls are going unanswered. Home care workers are stretched thin and underpaid. Patients drive hours for basic services, while communities lose jobs, trust, and the sense that their futures and their health are secure in their rural communities. For decades, the dominant response has been to search for a single silver bullet: a new reimbursement model, a hospital merger, a telehealth platform. But rural health challenges are not isolated problems....