Maryland Healthcare for All releases 2024 legislative agenda

MARYLAND –  Maryland Healthcare For All , a healthcare advocacy group has announced their goals for the 2024 legislative session, looking to further decrease premiums and increase health coverage for Marylanders.

“Maryland has made tremendous progress going from 13% uninsured to 6%. And we just released a report to it that saved all of us $460 million in uncompensated hospital care, which would have gotten our premiums higher. We need to go from 36% to 0%,” said Director Vinny DeMarco who says that their latest push will be to include immigrants regardless of status in the state’s healthcare to further drop the uninsured population.

Another bill would seek to expand the authority of the state’s Prescription Drug Affordability Board to make high-cost drugs affordable for more than its current authority state and local governments to purchase through local health departments.

“There’s legislation by Delegate Bonnie Carlson and Jen White, Holland Senators Don Gail and Brian Feldman to give them the authority to make high-cost drugs more affordable for all of us,” DeMarco said saying the Board under the new law would set state-wide price caps for all insurance plans and even those buying drugs out of pocket.

“the board says whatever you want to charge Big Pharma, we’re only paying X amount a reasonable amount. That’s what we want to do in Maryland. We are doing that now for state and local governments, we want to give the board the authority to do that for everyone. The fact is that drugs don’t work if people can’t afford them,” DeMarco said.