Healthcare & Drug Discovery:
Maintaining Leadership While Expanding Access
Massachusetts is one of the world's leading centers for biomedical research, life sciences, and health innovation. The challenge is ensuring that breakthroughs created here don't just reach patients globally, but stay affordable and accessible for the residents of the Commonwealth who helped build the ecosystem that produced them.
At a Glance
All four candidates support this principle and all four raise federal research-funding cuts as an immediate threat. Azeem focuses on defending funding through legal action and AI biosafety liability. Barber points to her legislative record on drug-cost affordability (copay elimination, ConnectorCare expansion, MassHealth drug-price negotiation). McLaughlin ties continued investment to worker wages and downstream affordability commitments. Uyterhoeven frames the issue around administrative waste and monopoly pricing, and centers single-payer health care as her core solution.
The Question Candidates Answered: "I support policies that strengthen Massachusetts' leadership in health care innovation while making breakthrough treatments more affordable, accessible, and beneficial for everyone."
Burhan Azeem: I support this principle
How would you advance this principle if elected? The biggest risk here is the Trump administration suing and cutting off national funds for healthcare research. We need to fight to make sure we're keeping funding flowing and advance lawsuits that will continue to challenge the undemocratic and illegal actions he's taking.
For AI, there is a particular risk to biosafety. We need to make sure companies are building responsibly and not just letting things happen, and when things go wrong, we have to ensure that they are held liable so that we can fix the messes while also providing a deterrent effect.
I also support the DRIVE Initiative, which would advance $400 million in state funding to support Massachusetts' innovation economy.
What would success look like? Success would look like us staying at #1 in this area. We have a little bit of competition from SF and the NC research triangle, but we should continue to build our reputation as the top hub of biosciences in America.
Christine P. Barber: I support this principle
How would you advance this principle if elected? I spent eight years at Community Catalyst, and before that helped draft Chapter 58, the 2006 Massachusetts health reform law that became the blueprint for the Affordable Care Act.
Discovery only counts if people can afford what gets discovered. My record sits on the affordability side of that equation. In 2025 I passed a law eliminating cost sharing for medications treating diabetes, asthma, and heart disease, conditions that fall on low-income communities and communities of color. I led passage of the ConnectorCare expansion to 500 percent of the federal poverty level, reaching an estimated 50,000-70,000 residents. I helped secure the budget provision authorizing MassHealth to negotiate prescription drug prices, saving over $103 million while preserving benefits. I passed the law allowing pharmacists to prescribe contraception. On the research side, the immediate task is defense. Federal cuts threaten Massachusetts hospitals and labs. I would support bridge funding for interrupted grants, continued Life Sciences Initiative investment, and training pipelines into lab technician, biomanufacturing, and clinical research jobs that do not require a doctorate. I would also keep pressing on transparency. Pharmacy benefit manager practices, list price increases, and the gap between what a drug costs to develop and what a patient is charged deserve state scrutiny. A treatment nobody can pay for is not a breakthrough.
What would success look like? Health care innovation that patients can afford and access. Nobody in Massachusetts rationing insulin or an inhaler because of cost. Coverage that reaches the families, even if they are just over the income limits. Labs and teaching hospitals still doing the work here when federal funding wobbles. And a drug pricing system where the public can see what it is paying for and why.
Matt McLaughlin: I support this principle
How would you advance this principle if elected? I would continue strategic investment in the biomedical innovation economy in Massachusetts. Companies that operate in this state have and continue to change the world. But that cannot happen at the expense of the workers who make all of this possible. We need to continue to invest in medical innovation, but similar to what we do for building contracts, ensure that protections are in place for livable wages for all workers. That is how we continue to grow without the bottom falling out. Further, we need to be able to tie state investment to affordability downstream. If Massachusetts residents are footing the bill for these investments, they deserve a stake in the future successes, whether that is fair wages for workers in and around these industries or for the affordability of the drugs and solutions that will improve people's lives.
What would success look like? Success looks like a strong innovation economy, bolstered by state investment and public support, and RFP and bid agreements that center the working class people who help make these important industries run and the people of Massachusetts who should have clear and affordable access to the benefits of the investment.
Erika Uyterhoeven: I support this principle
How would you advance this principle if elected? Health care innovation and health care affordability are not in tension: monopolistic pricing and administrative waste are what stand between Massachusetts residents and the treatments this state produces. In the Senate, I will fight to pass the Medicare for All Act and move Massachusetts toward a single-payer system that eliminates the billing complexity now driving over forty percent of our $128 billion in annual health spending into waste. That is how we cut drug costs, protect community hospitals from the next Steward model driven collapse, and defend the residents facing $3.5 billion a year in federal Medicaid cuts. The Health Policy Commission's new Office of Pharmaceutical Policy should have the authority to set real upper payment limits on drug prices, and I will fight to give it that power so patients can actually access the treatments our life sciences sector discovers. Workforce development must match our research ambitions, and I will work to expand community college nursing programs and lab technician apprenticeships so the people in our communities can build careers in the industry that defines our economy. Massachusetts leads the world in biomedical discovery, and I will make sure that leadership serves the residents who live here.
What would success look like? Success looks like a Massachusetts where no one skips a prescription because of cost, where community hospitals stay open instead of collapsing under private equity debt, and where the billions we now spend on billing paperwork go to patient care. It looks like drug prices with real enforceable upper limits and a health care workforce trained in our own communities. And it looks like a life sciences sector whose breakthroughs reach the residents who live near the labs that made them, because we proved that innovation and health care affordability were never in conflict.