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I hardly recognize the 340B drug discount program when I read the pharmaceutical industry’s criticisms about it. They say that 340B has grown too big, is without oversight and transparency, and is in desperate need of reform. Having spent more than a decade working with this program at the Health Resources and Services Administration (HRSA) Office of Pharmacy Affairs, I know that such attacks on the program are unfounded, unfair, and dangerous. (Bradford R. Lang, 6/19)

Every businessperson understands the “art of the deal” has little to do with art and everything to do with leverage. But as we discovered when President Donald Trump released his long-promised plan to lower drug prices, the business of politics often trumps real-world business principles. Nowhere in the ironically titled “American Patients First” blueprint is there any requirement for Medicare to negotiate directly with drug manufacturers. So, despite all of Trump’s rhetoric and promises, pharmaceutical companies and their lobbyists won, and seniors lost. Patients are not the first priority after all. (Gary West, 6/15)

Across most markets in our economy consumers can easily obtain and process information regarding products for sale. So when, for instance, Ford launches the latest version of the F-150, based on consumer reports and comparative price information, customers can evaluate whether the price is worth it to them. Here, the conditions for an efficiently functioning market are met. There is competition, free flow of information regarding the product’s characteristics, and transparency regarding pricing. Not so with prescription drugs. (Joshua Cohen, 6/14)

While everyone else is watching the World Cup, biotech bankers are keeping busy. This week will bring a bumper crop of baby biopharmas into the market, with seven expected to go public in the U.S. — the most in more than three years, according to data compiled by Bloomberg. The list includes companies working on cutting-edge medical research, from potentially curative gene therapies to cancer treatments using re-engineered immune cells. If all seven companies raise as much money as they hope to, it will set a weekly record. (Max Nisen, 6/18)

In a raw crypt beneath Our Lady of the Conception of the Capuchins church in Rome stretches an exuberant display of skeletal remains. The piled skulls, fanned hip bones, and arched spines — remnants of centuries of Capuchin friars — bear a warning. Printed on a sign in three languages, it reads: “What you are now, we once were. What we are now, you shall be.” (Kylah Goodfellow Klinge, 6/19)