³Ô¹Ï²»´òìÈ

Drug makers are about to lose a key ally in Washington. Republican Sen. Orrin Hatch of Utah, a longtime advocate for the drug industry, announced Tuesday he will retire at the end of his term this year. Across a four-decades-long career in the Senate, Hatch used influential positions atop the Finance Committee, the Health, Education, Labor and Pensions Committee, and the Judiciary Committee to advance the industry’s major policy priorities. (Mershon, 1/2)

The news that Finance Committee Chairman Sen. Orrin G. Hatch of Utah would retire after this year resonated in health policy circles Tuesday. Hatch’s decades-long influence over health issues is hard to overstate. In the near term, Hatch will oversee a long-term renewal of financing for the Children’s Health Insurance Program, which he and Sen. Edward M. Kennedy, D-Mass., created in 1997. The politically popular program extended coverage to the children of poor families who didn’t qualify for Medicaid, the program for the poor. CHIP was reauthorized multiple times over the last two decades, and Hatch is currently trying to extend the program’s financing for another five years. (Siddons, 1/2)