RealClearHealth Articles

When Arkansas lawmakers rushed through Act 624 this spring, they cast it as a bold defense of independent pharmacies. The law prohibited pharmacy benefit managers (PBMs)—the intermediaries that negotiate prices with drug manufacturers, manage insurance formularies, and reimburse pharmacies for prescriptions—from owning pharmacies or having common ownership with Arkansas pharmacies. While this may have seemed like a win for locally owned businesses, barely sixty days later a federal court enjoined it as unconstitutional, setting it up to likely be...

As an M.D. (ophthalmologist) with nearly two decades of practice in aesthetic skin care, I’m witness to frequent expressions of joy and satisfaction when my patients see their results. Unfortunately, I am also witness to a growing incidence of social media fearmongering concerning hyaluronic acid (HA) that contradicts clinical evidence and threatens access to treatments that 97% of users find safe and satisfying. Social media misinformation about HA fillers is spreading faster than facts, creating unnecessary fear and potentially costing Americans access to safe, effective treatments....

September 16, the U.S. House Ways and Means Committee held a hearing entitled “Virtue Signaling vs. Vital Services: Where Tax-Exempt Hospitals Are Spending Your Tax Dollars.” For New Yorkers, the issue hits close to home. Just months after signing a multi-year agreement with Healthfirst, New York-Presbyterian abruptly cancelled the contract - an alarming reminder that many nonprofit hospitals put profits ahead of patients. These tactics, including pressuring insurers into deals that preserve sky-high prices, have already prompted a proposed class action lawsuit from a United Food...

As health insurers have consolidated and tightened their grip on the U.S. health care system – and in particular on physician practices – doctors increasingly have to spend their days battling red tape, fighting with insurers, and watching their reimbursements shrink while their operating expenses increase every year. Doctors who are determined to resist being bought by an insurer or large hospital system are finding it harder and harder to do so without outside investment. I frequently speak at physician conferences and I repeatedly hear doctors’ concern that private...

Last week, Attorney General Pam Bondi, Health and Human Services Secretary Robert F. Kennedy Jr., and FDA Commissioner Marty Makary were present at a raid outside Chicago that seized 600,000 units of illegal vapes.   The bust reflects a wider public health scandal: more than 80 percent of the vaping market comprises illicit products, a majority of which are smuggled in as disposable devices from China. Although warehouse and convenience store raids make good television, they won’t put a dent in the illicit market. But even if they somehow did, many of the 25 million current adult...

Last week began a national race for $50 billion in federal funds designated for rural healthcare in the states.  Centers for Medicare & Medicaid Services head Mehmet Oz made big promises in a press event about the program’s impact, calling it a “massive opportunity to make rural America healthy again.” This comes as CMS just concluded taking public comment on its Competitive Bidding Program (CBP), a lesser-known initiative but one with far-reaching consequences  for patients using medical devices. CMS’s proposal is a bad one...

  Last week, the U.S. House of Representatives passed a continuing resolution (CR) that would fund the government through November 21. However, Senate Democrats blocked its passage, meaning government funding for discretionary programs may lapse at the end of the month. Democrats have released an alternative CR that would repeal the health provisions of the One Big Beautiful Bill (OBBB) and permanently extend Obamacare subsidies that were designed to address the COVID pandemic. As Paragon has discussed, the OBBB curbs Medicaid waste and promotes accountability. During the...

The MAHA Commission’s mission to improve children’s health is both urgent and vital. Ensuring that every family has access to nutritious, affordable food today—and for generations to come—is not only a public health imperative but a national priority. Achieving this goal, however, requires that federal food policy be grounded in transparent, evidence-based science. Regrettably, the second MAHA Commission report falls short of this standard, failing to meet the “gold standard science” called for by President Trump.  The first report set...

The Importance of American Biotech to America’s National Security The direct and indirect economic contribution of the U.S. biopharmaceutical sector is estimated to be $1.65 trillion, including $800 billion in direct output in 2022, and an additional $850 billion through its suppliers and other sectors; this combined output impact represents 3.6% of all U.S. output (Link). Small and mid-sized biotech firms are the source of the lion’s share of American biotech innovation: all 50 first-in-class (FIC) oncology drugs that were approved by the FDA from 2010 through 2020, large pharma...

Health experts, former CDC directors, and medical associations are gravely concerned that HHS Secretary RFK Jr.’s actions are risking Americans’ health and wellbeing. Nine former directors of the CDC from both Republican and Democratic administrations warned that Secretary Kennedy’s leadership is a threat to Americans’ health. Another 1,000+ current and former HHS staff have called for Kennedy’s resignation due to his actions that “are compromising the health of this nation.” The new public health leadership’s efforts to...

In early June, Connecticut instituted a $375 million hospital tax increase, adding near-50% to its last reported hospital tax net revenue of $790 million in fiscal 2024. Mostly likely, the increase violated the One Big Beautiful Bill Act, or pre-existing federal law, or both. The state has offered a confusing and unconvincing defense, claiming to have the approval of Center for Medicare and Medicaid Services (CMS), whose role in the matter is also suspect.   The OBBBA prohibits increases in so-called health care provider tax rates. Even before the OBBBA’s enactment, increases...

When Congress passed the Hatch-Waxman Act in 1984, it was a model of smart policymaking. The law struck a careful balance, maintaining patent protections to reward pharmaceutical innovators for undertaking the risks of drug development, while ensuring that once patents expired, lower-cost generics could quickly reach the market. The framework it established worked for decades, fueling innovation and saving American patients billions. But that framework has been hijacked by Big Pharma’s newest innovation: serial patent litigation. A new white paper from the Association for Accessible...

Families across America are feeling squeezed - and the culprits are seemingly all around. The prices of homes, groceries, transportation, and child care have all surged in recent years. President Trump has taken aim at this cost-of-living crisis with a slew of proposals intended to bring prices down. Unfortunately, when it comes to the price inflation that's arguably hurting consumers most, in the prescription drug market, the president's proposed policy is likely to leave Americans even worse off. President Trump has proposed "Most Favored Nation" (MFN)...

Most new drugs released in the U.S. are the product of 15-year development projects that cost billions and frequently result in failure. An easier, faster way is hiding in plain sight. Thousands of generic medications sitting in our medical cabinets are a potential goldmine of new applications that could be developed in years, not decades. The Trump administration can revolutionize healthcare by establishing a systematic framework to study and develop repurposed generic drugs. For millennia medicine has been practiced by observation. Physicians tried different approaches...

  Congress has two weeks to fund the government, and many congressional Democrats are threatening to shut down the federal government unless Congress sends tens of billions of dollars more to health insurers annually. Specifically, the issue is whether to extend the Biden COVID credits that fueled massive waste and fraud while contributing to big insurer profits. Last week’s newsletter reviewed five major reasons why Congress should permit the COVID credits to expire. In this week’s newsletter, I highlight three Paragon comment letters in...

When it comes to reducing the harm caused by illicit drugs, we’ve learned we need to trust people to make safer choices, not legislate them out of existence. People getting their lives back on track need all the options they can get. The opioid epidemic has ravaged the United States since the 1990s, and over the past 10 years, we’ve dealt with yet another wave of widespread misuse of prescription and illicit opioids resulting in increased addiction, overdose, and death. Luckily in the past few years, we’ve started to see declines in opioid-related deaths due to a combination...

Regulatory discretion is not always the better part of valor. In fact, when it comes to the illegal, unregulated, and unsafe manufacturing of moonshine GLP-1 products, it’s regulatory malpractice – with broad negative public health consequences. Because of the FDA’s unwillingness to exercise its bully pulpit and existing authorities relative to post-shortage GLP-1 compounding, the situation is spinning out of control. Nature abhors a vacuum and the FDA’s lack of oversight and action has created a regulatory vacuum. Inactions have consequences. Under Section 503B of the...

What would you do if you saw an ad claiming that the medication you take daily is dangerous? Would you stop taking it immediately, risking your health—or would you talk to your doctor first? Unfortunately, many patients are choosing fear over facts. Misleading advertisements, driven by trial lawyers, are putting lives at risk by encouraging people to abandon essential treatments without medical guidance. In 2024, over $2.5 billion was spent on 26.9 million legal service ads nationwide. The odds of you seeing even just one of these ads are extremely high, as they have...

Health care in the United States sits at the crux of a frustrating truth; it is the home of some of the newest and best forms of treatment and services that are saving countless lives, but it is also exorbitantly expensive in a way that is simply unsustainable for our economy and for patients. For decades, the U.S. has shouldered the burden of expense for the rest of the world’s continually developing health care practices, and the strain is showing. We must take a careful look at where changes can be made that will reduce costs without impacting the quality of care we provide. An easy...