Our Defining Edge: Improving Affordability
By: Priscilla VanderVeer
At No Patient Left Behind, we have a defining edge: Our small, focused team moves quickly, deploying resources and our network where they matter most. We function as a catalytic hub: convening CEOs, investors, patient leaders, and policy experts, converting their expertise into coordinated, high-impact action.
In this series, we’re exploring how we’ve used our defining edge to bring clarity and credibility to policy debates. You can read the other pieces in the series here and here.
Most of us pay our health insurance premiums so that if we do get sick or injured, the treatments our doctors prescribe will be covered. But increasingly, that coverage is coming with high out-of-pocket costs.
Some plans and middlemen known as PBMs make patients pay based off list prices, rather than the deeply discounted prices the plan gets. They claim that the extra money these patients pay helps offset premiums. But the sick shouldn’t subsidize the healthy. That’s not how insurance is supposed to work.
Our research agenda delves into this issue. We put out a report that reveals how health exchange plans have shifted costs to sicker patients. It found that plans have increased patients’ prescription drug out-of-pocket costs by 36%, on average, since 2021.
I’m also sharing my lived experience of navigating insurance while managing a lifelong illness, from coverage gaps to thousands of dollars in out-of-pocket costs.
And through our PAAC and LOOP Coalition, we work alongside patient and consumer advocates to advance key insurance reforms, like capping out-of-pocket costs and making prior authorizations real-time, electronic, and frictionless.
With coalition membership growing, we have rapid access to 18,000+ readers eager to amplify a simple, unifying principle: when a doctor prescribes a medicine and an insurer authorizes it, it should be affordable to the patient at low or no out-of-pocket cost.
Last year, we:
Helped patients navigate their healthcare coverage through our patient Fine Print webinar series
Connected patients with inventors’ Patient Support or Patient Assistance Programs and other tools to help them overcome access barriers through our Call the Inventors campaign
As cost shifting by insurers continues to threaten patient access, we’ll maintain our multi-year research, education, and marketing efforts to protect patients now and in the future.
Read more about where we’ve been and what’s ahead for 2026 here.