Healthcare Brew’s Maia Anderson talks drug pricing

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This week’s Making Rounds spotlights Maia Anderson, our first reporter hired to launch Healthcare Brew. Anderson, who is based in Los Angeles and is a relative newcomer to writing about healthcare, weighed in on how she does her job and the issues that stump her.

This interview has been lightly edited for length and clarity.

What’s the biggest misconception people might have about your job?

How we get our stories—people don’t really understand that. My dad is not in healthcare, but he thought that someone else did the research for me and I just wrote. I had several people ask me at CES where I get my stories from. A lot of that is talking to a lot of people in the industry. That’s the biggest way we get stories. We want to reflect what’s actually going on in the industry and not just what we’re perceiving. That’s a big misconception. We’re not just pulling stories out of thin air.

How do you incorporate different perspectives into a story?

The most important thing is thinking about whose voices are the most relevant for the story. There are a million different viewpoints for every single story, so that’s usually looking at who’s most affected by whatever this story is. For the [New York City] nursing strike, the most affected are the nurses themselves but also the patients if there aren’t nurses to take care of them. And obviously getting the viewpoint of who they’re striking against because those two parties are going to have very different views about what’s going on.

How do you think your experience of being a military brat has influenced your reporting?

It helps because I’ve lived in both big cities and very small towns. To see firsthand how different perspectives can be in Los Angeles versus Jamestown, Ohio, where I went to high school.

A small town has a unified consensus on certain issues, and that changes very widely based on where you’re located. Being able to see it and live it firsthand—I lived several years in small towns, and I’ve lived several years in multiple big cities—and getting that kind of firsthand witnessing of how people think and act and respond to the news differently is very helpful to just remind yourself that perspectives are going to be different.

What part of the healthcare industry stumps you?

Pharmaceutical drug pricing is probably one of the hardest things to understand. Like the way drug prices are set. I’ve researched a million times, and I’m still learning something new every time. There are so many different businesses and players that have a part in how drug prices are set. It’s very hard to follow.

Is there a trend that you’re not optimistic about this year?

I’m least optimistic about drug pricing because that’s always something the government says it’s going to work on, but nothing ever really gets accomplished. There are several packages on the floor right now, but I wouldn’t be optimistic that any progress is going to be made on that landscape anytime soon. I don’t know what it’s going to take for drug pricing reform to actually happen.

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