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Boston Globe
4 days ago
- Business
- Boston Globe
Healey, moving to cut red rape and burnish business-friendly chops, unveils dozens of regulatory changes
Advertisement 'What's most important is the mindset, [the] message that we heard,' said Jim Rooney, president of the Greater Boston Chamber of Commerce. 'This administration has that mindset of trying to deal with issues that are burdensome for people in businesses.' The various regulatory amendments followed a Her administration ultimately reviewed 150 sets of regulations. Healey said her administration is ultimately 'cutting down' 38 of them, many of which may appear minor, if not esoteric, to most consumers. One would Advertisement Grocery stores and supermarkets would no longer have to make parts of so-called Healey said the Division of Insurance would also no longer require banks and insurance companies to submit paper copies of filings in many instances. 'We'll save some trees in the process,' Healey said as she fed a prop piece of paper into the whirring shredder. 'It's about making sure that we have the right regulations [and] smart regulations.' Healey isn't the first governor to boast of slashing red tape for businesses. Governor Deval Patrick, a Democrat, boasted in his final year in office in 2014 having led a review of nearly 1,800 regulations, and Months after taking office in 2015, his successor, Charlie Baker ordered a wide-scale review of 'onerous' regulations. The move immediately Jon Hurst, president of the Retailers Association of Massachusetts, said many of Patrick and Baker's efforts ultimately had 'little or nothing to show' for it. Advertisement He said his own members had raised to their administrations concerns about the unit pricing rules or the state's so-called hoisting regulations — think forklifts, Hurst said — without ever seeing action on them. Healey on Wednesday offered changes to the latter, including removing the requirement that hoisting engineering applicants communicate in English. Those moves are encouraging, Hurst said, even if 'these were the easy ones, right?' 'The hard ones are yet to come,' he said, pointing to the potential for tackling escalating health insurance costs for businesses — a shift that could require legislation, is often complicated, and usually 'politically fraught.' 'We're just kind of just hitting the surface at this point,' he said. Healey called Wednesday's announcement a 'first set of cuts and reforms,' though she did not indicate where or what rules her administration would review next. Healey's first term, and her bid next year to remain in office, will likely hinge in part on whether she's met her repeated promise to shed Massachusetts' tax-heavy label and She ran on realizing, and signed, a Advertisement Both Republicans who've announced challenges to Healey — former MBTA executive 'Massachusetts [is] bleeding businesses, private sector jobs and workers,' Holly Robichaud, a Shortsleeve adviser, said in a statement Wednesday. Matt Stout can be reached at
Yahoo
22-05-2025
- Health
- Yahoo
Lawmakers advance proposal to cap insulin costs at $35 per month
Nevada could become the 27th state to cap the out-of-pocket cost of insulin for people on private insurance plans. (Photo Illustration by) Tens of thousands of Nevadans could pay less each month for insulin if lawmakers approve a proposed out-of-pocket cap on commercial insurance plans, according to the state Division of Insurance. Assembly Bill 555, sponsored by Speaker Steve Yeager, would prohibit private insurance companies from charging people more than $35 for a 30-day supply of a prescription insulin drug. The Senate and Assembly committees on commerce and labor in a joint meeting heard the bill Wednesday and immediately advanced it. Currently, no such cap on out-of-pocket insulin costs exists for private insurance companies, resulting in 'outrageous and unpredictable' prices for many Nevadans, according to Yeager. The Las Vegas Democrat told the committee he has heard of people paying up to $500 per month for insulin. Adam Plain from the Nevada Division of Insurance estimated there could be 70,000 Nevadans who have diabetes and are on private insurance plans regulated by the state. Private insurance makes up 18.6% of health care plans in the state, he said. Just under 11% of the adult population in the state has diagnosed diabetes, according to the American Diabetes Association. More broadly, the association estimated that nearly 270,000 people in Nevada have been diagnosed diabetic and an additional 70,000 have it but haven't been diagnosed. Twenty-six states, as well as the District of Columbia, have capped out-of-pocket insulin costs for commercial insurance plans, according to the association. Caps range from $25 in Connecticut to $100 bucks in Alabama and Delaware for a 30-day supply. With AB 555, Nevada policy would align with President Joe Biden's Inflation Reduction Act, which established a $35 out-of-pocket insulin cost cap for people on Medicare. Yeager referenced research finding that the number of fulfilled insulin prescriptions rose after the cap provision went into effect, suggesting that fewer people are skipping or rationing their medications because of their high costs. Yeager called his legislation a 'partial answer' and acknowledged it would not help uninsured cash payers. The legislation also does not affect health care plans offered by public employers. During the hearing, Republican state Sen. John Ellison of Elko commented that President Donald Trump recently said he would lower the cost of all prescriptions. 'I thought that was so amazing,' Ellison added. Trump signed an executive order on May 12 aimed at lowering drug prices by pressuring pharmaceutical companies to align their U.S. pricing models with those in similarly wealthy countries. It has been panned by Democrats as unserious. Yeager did not comment on the executive order but said he generally 'would be all for' any federal action that goes beyond what he is proposing at the state level. At the same time, 'there is no reason' Nevada shouldn't do what it can while it can, he argued. AB 555 will provide financial relief to Nevadans feeling the effects of 'disastrous economic policies at the national level,' he'd said at an earlier point in the hearing, an obvious dig at Trump. 'It is incumbent on us at the state level to find solutions for them.' Groups supporting AB 555 include the Nevada State Medical Association, Nevada Women's Lobby, Retail Association of Nevada, and Battle Born Progress. The bill's only public opposition came from Americans for Prosperity, which believes the bill would interfere with 'the natural price mechanisms of the market' and comes with the risk of 'creating a cascade of unintended consequences.' The Nevada Association of Health Plans has taken a neutral position on the bill, but lobbyist Shelly Capurro said some of its 11 members had concerns about unintended consequences. After the hearing, during the meeting's general public comment period, Plain, the insurance regulation liaison for the state, addressed lawmakers as a private individual with diabetes. He thanked them for taking on the subject. He said that with the 'pretty good insurance' he gets as a state employee he pays $320 for a 90-day supply of insulin and three other medications, pen needles, and glucose monitoring. 'The list price for those four meds is $4,000 for a 90-day supply,' he added. Another Nevadan, Lisa Lynn Chapman, testified that when she first started taking insulin for her Type-2 diabetes, her needles and insulin were free. Then, her employer changed insurance and 'suddenly, my two different insulins cost $60 each, and my needles were $35 a month.' The cost, she added, was difficult to absorb. High costs are not what the three men who discovered and secured the patent rights for insulin wanted, Yeager told the joint committee in his closing. One of them, Frederick Banting, is famously quoted as saying, 'Insulin does not belong to me. It belongs to the world.' They sold their patents for $1 each to the University of Toronto in 1923. 'Somehow we are here in the year 2025 and people are paying $500 a month for something that was assigned patent rights for a dollar over a hundred years ago,' said Yeager. 'To me that is not and never will be acceptable.'
