Small business owners are struggling to keep up with the rising cost of health care. Nearly a third have stopped offering health benefits as premiums continue to climb.
It is critical that lawmakers understand the reasons for rising costs and begin to address them – or small businesses will continue to drop health coverage due to unsustainable costs. One of these reasons is hospitals’ exploitation of a little-known federal charity program. Without reforms, that program will continue to drive up costs for small businesses and the self-employed.
GLOUCESTER CITY, NJ (CNBNews)(May 25, 2026)–The owner of the BluLight marijuana dispensary, North Broadway and Warren Street, had a mural drawn on the Warren Street side of the building. Included is a sketch of the Walt Whitman Bridge. A portion of the bridge, which spans the Delaware River, connecting New Jersey to Philadelphia, PA, and beyond, can be seen on the horizon at a distance. The number 1868, which is the year the City of Gloucester was incorporated, is also inscribed. The mural was created by Lord Henry, a talented artist whose work you can check out at drol.com.co or on Instagram at @lordhenry_05. According to the artist, the piece is inspired by South Jersey and the local community, including elements like the Walt Whitman Bridge to represent the connection between Gloucester City, Philadelphia, and the people who pass through the area every day. Our goal was to create something visually impactful that would help brighten up the neighborhood and add a creative landmark to the area.
The death rate from cancer in the United States has fallen by more than one-third since 1991. HIV-related mortality has dropped ninefold since 1995. Death rates for Alzheimer’s, chronic respiratory diseases, and stroke have all declined in recent years, too.
These gains didn’t happen by accident. They’re the result of decades of medical innovation that have helped people live longer, healthier lives.
THE SECRETIVE GLOUCESTER CITY COUNCIL(Monday, July 20, 2015)—At a recent executive session of the Gloucester City Mayor and Council, City Solicitor Leonard Wood gave an in-depth report on the ongoing negotiations with the NHP Foundation and what they are looking to do with financing the purchase of city-owned property Chatham Square.
CNBNews submitted an OPRA requesting a copy of that report to the council and was told by the custodian of records, Kathy Jentsch, “This matter is currently in the negotiation stage. These materials are in the possession of our attorney for that purpose-attorney-client privilege”.
As Silicon Valley pours hundreds of billions of dollars into an artificial intelligence arms race, a parallel battle is unfolding over something far less visible but just as consequential: Netflix and a legion of tech giants — such as Apple, Microsoft, and Google — are quietly collaborating to seize control of the technologies behind video streaming.
This erosion of a competitive marketplace will inevitably lead to stagnant innovation, subpar consumer electronics, and a shrinking job market for the American workforce.
As a career-long supporter of the small business sector, I have witnessed firsthand how agile innovators can disrupt the status quo and eventually take the lead. However, once these startups become the establishment, they frequently succumb to the temptation of protecting their territory. Instead of out-innovating the next generation, they attempt to paralyze them.
Dr. Dennis Liotta In my nearly 50 years as a chemist at Emory University, I’ve seen the life-changing impact that federally funded university research can have firsthand. I spent the 1980s and 1990s helping develop the first treatments for HIV, which turned the disease from a death sentence into a manageable illness. Today, drugs like these are estimated to save over a million lives each year.
That’s why I was so alarmed to hear Commerce Secretary Howard Lutnick state recently that U.S. taxpayers get “zero” return on their investment in university research — and that the government should start seizing licensing revenues on universities’ patents it helps fund to secure a better deal for the public.
A new program just helped 50 participants shed more than 40 pounds each, get off nearly 100 prescriptions, and save roughly $83,000 in medication and care costs over one year. The program — focused on improving participants’ metabolic health — offered a clear glimpse of what’s possible when we address America’s health crisis at its root.
Today, one in three American adults suffers from metabolic syndrome — a condition marked by obesity, high blood sugar, high blood pressure, low cholesterol, and too many triglycerides in the blood. It underlies many chronic diseases, including type 2 diabetes, fatty liver disease, and cardiovascular disease, and it sharply increases the risk of heart attacks and strokes.
Universities may look like quiet enclaves of students and stately buildings, but their labs are some of the most productive engines of innovation in the country. The discoveries made there ripple far beyond campus — improving medical care, advancing national security, and launching entire industries.
That pathway from lab to marketplace exists because of an effective law: the Bayh-Dole Act.
Co-sponsored by former Indiana senator Birch Bayh and Robert Dole of Kansas, the law gives universities the ability — and aligns their interests with potential private sector partners — to protect and license inventions made with federal research funding. The results are all around us. Google’s search algorithm, key cryptocurrency technologies, and several breakthrough cancer medicines all trace back to federally-funded research.
Pennsylvania researchers are spearheading some of the world’s most promising medical and other technological advances.
University of Pennsylvania scientists helped develop a personalized cancer immunotherapy that programs a patient’s own immune cells to kill tumors, while other UPenn researchers made the groundbreaking mRNA discoveries behind the Covid-19 vaccines. University of Pittsburgh scientists recently pioneered better ways to diagnose breast cancer and Alzheimer’s. Carnegie Mellon engineers, meanwhile, made breakthroughs on autonomous driving technology that have since been further developed by Ford and Volkswagen, and their computer science graduates are among the most highly sought after new hires.
But now, the Commerce Department is floating a proposal that would impede the commercialization of university researchers’ most compelling discoveries from ever reaching American patients and consumers.
President Donald Trump is wasting no time completing the ambitious goals left unfinished after his first term.
Soon, he’ll have a rare opportunity to complete another critical piece of unfinished business: ending the exploitation of U.S. businesses by our two largest trading partners, Canada and Mexico.
In the coming months, the United States will undertake a scheduled review of the United States-Mexico-Canada Agreement, or USMCA — the landmark trade deal reached during President Trump’s first term. During that review, the administration will have the chance to restore crucial intellectual property protections that Democrats insisted be dropped after the deal was first negotiated.
I was involved in the negotiation of the USMCA as President Trump’s deputy U.S. trade representative. The president’s goal was to replace the disastrous North American Free Trade Agreement with a modern pact that would protect American workers, innovators, and businesses. A central part of that was strengthening intellectual property protections.
Yet before the deal could take effect, Democrats in Congress stripped out several key protections. For example, we had secured commitments from Mexico and Canada to provide 10 years of regulatory data protection for certain new medicines. Regulatory data protection provides temporary protection for the confidential information that drug developers share with authorities to prove a medicine is safe and effective before it can be sold. House Democrats led efforts to remove this provision, claiming that stronger protections would raise drug prices.
That’s nonsense. The United States already provides 12 years of regulatory data protection, so the change wouldn’t have altered the U.S. market. Removing it has only allowed Canadian and Mexican firms to more easily copy U.S.-made drugs.
Democrats weakened other key IP protections negotiated as part of USMCA, opening the door for Canada and Mexico to undercut U.S. innovators.
Mexico’s failures are especially troubling. In the U.S. trade representative’s most recent Special 301 Report — an annual report spotlighting foreign IP violations — Mexico was placed on the Priority Watch List for “long-standing and significant” concerns, including rampant counterfeiting and piracy.
And Canada has its own shortcomings. It is on the Special 301 Watch List and continues to impose drug price controls that undervalue American-made medicines and exacerbate foreign free-riding on U.S. innovation.
By fixing prices below market value, Canada — like many wealthy nations — forces companies to absorb losses abroad, making it harder to fund new research and pushing a greater share of costs onto American patients. President Trump is actively working to resolve this imbalance as part of lowering drug prices for U.S. patients — and fixing the USMCA is an important place to start.
The needed reforms are straightforward. Create enforceable, verifiable standards mandating respect for IP. Restore the 10-year regulatory data protection standard originally negotiated as part of the USMCA in 2018. Require Canada to abandon price controls and devote a higher, fairer level of spending to new drug development. And enforce full compliance with existing requirements.
The Trump administration now has the opportunity to finish the job it started in the first term on IP protection under the USMCA. For the sake of American workers and innovators, it must not let this opportunity go to waste.
Ambassador Jeffrey Gerrish served as the deputy U.S. trade representative for Asia, Europe, the Middle East and industrial competitiveness from 2018 to 2020. This piece originally appeared in Newsweek.
