Business

The Maryland Department of Health has agreed to renew Kaiser Permanente’s contract as a Medicaid provider, averting an outcome that one prominent health care advocate said would have amounted to a blow to public health. Gene Ransom, CEO of the independent Maryland State Medical Society, said Tuesday that a tentative decision made by the state health department last week to remove the health care giant from its list of managed care organizations (MCOs) that provide care through Medicaid would have left about 110,000 Marylanders without health care coverage and seeking new doctors with little time to adjust their status.

On a recent Friday afternoon, the scene outside the decades-old office buildings of Columbia Gateway is eerily quiet. Few people are strolling outside, and there are parking lots as far as the eye can see. The tired late-summer sun shines on the occasional car driving along the streets, which pass “For Lease” signs at almost every other building.

Pava LaPere’s colleagues at EcoMap Technologies helped make one of her dreams come true on Tuesday. LaPere, an up-and-coming tech CEO, was remembered at the EcoMap SuperConnect Conference. Maryland Gov. Wes Moore and LaPere’s colleagues had a lot to say. “Her loss was not only tragic, it was heartbreaking,” Moore said.

Steak and fries chain Medium Rare has closed its Baltimore location after less than a year in operation, according to founder Mark Bucher. Since the restaurant opened in Hampden’s Rotunda in November, “our losses were massive,” Bucher said, totaling $480,000. The restaurant — which originated in Washington, D.C., and has locations in Columbia and Bethesda, Dallas, New Orleans, and Arlington, Virginia — is “killing it everywhere else.”

If everything had gone to plan for General Motors over the last three years, the Detroit automaker would be well on its way to catching Tesla in sales of electric vehicles. In October 2021, GM CEO Mary Barra declared the automaker would “absolutely” catch up to the U.S. EV leader by 2025. Instead, after slower-than-anticipated EV adoption across the industry and GM-specific challenges with production, software and supply chains, the company remains well behind Elon Musk’s carmaker, as well as Hyundai Motor/Kia and Ford Motor.

The Maryland Department of Agriculture is reminding Maryland poultry farmers to remain vigilant and practice enhanced biosecurity on their farms as the annual fall migration gets underway. Cases of Highly Pathogenic Avian Influenza (HPAI) continue to be detected in wild birds and poultry flocks in the Atlantic Flyway.

The city and the owner of an apartment complex in Baltimore’s Brewers Hill that was partially evacuated due to structural problems are at odds over whether it had a rental license. A city spokesman said Monday that Axel Brewers Hill had been operating without a city rental license for nearly a year. A representative of Excelsior Communities, which bought the complex in 2021, said there’s been no lapse in its rental license.