Starting in July, Medicare beneficiaries may be able to get a GLP-1 prescription for weight loss for $50 a month. It’s a notable shift for Medicare, which has long been barred from covering weight loss treatments. The drugs, such as Wegovy and Zepbound, are effective but can be expensive without insurance coverage. They’re available in…
Let’s say you’re the CEO of a health plan. A new drug just received approval to treat patients with lung cancer. The drug’s clinical trial examined how well the the drug worked on third line (3L) patients and patients with good funcional ability (e.g., performance status ECOG score of 0 or 1). FDA approved the…
LOS ANGELES — At Martin Luther King, Jr. Community Hospital, patients on gurneys line the hallways of the emergency department waiting for care, and overflow mental health patients are consigned to outdoor tents. The 152-bed hospital, which sits on a sprawling medical campus close to the predominantly Latino and Black neighborhood of Watts, is struggling…
Leeza Osipenko Ekaterina Cleary Julie Egginton By JULIE EGGINGTON, EKATERINA CLEARY & LEEZA OSIPENKO When CMS issued its Request for Information under the Comprehensive Regulations to Uncover Suspicious Healthcare (CRUSH) initiative in February, it zeroed in on a long-festering problem: fraud, waste, and abuse in laboratory testing, especially in genetic and molecular diagnostics. The laboratory…
Biosimilars aim to be lower cost options for biologic therapies after loss of exclusivity. A key question is whether these cost savings get passed through to patients via lower out-of-pocket costs. A paper by Dayer et al. (2026) aims to answer this question using 2011-2023 Merative MarketScan Commercial claims data. The authors observed: …significant patient…
In 2019, Mia Tretta, then a high school freshman at Saugus High School in Santa Clarita, California, was struck in the stomach by a round from a .45-caliber semiautomatic handgun fired by a schoolmate. Two students were killed during the attack, including her best friend, and two others were injured. When she graduated from high…
Complaints about hospital food are certainly not new, and Jell-O and fruit juice are often the butt of related jokes. But the Trump administration has recently upped the ante. It is urging the public to report hospitals and nursing homes that serve sugary drinks, nutrition shakes, or meals that it says don’t meet dietary guidelines…
These days you just have to wonder about the greed and corruption that is going on all around. Senator Dick Blumenthal is one of many who’ve been pointing out the naked corruption in the Trump family–Qatari jets, memecoins, Trump’s son being on the board of so many defence and prediction market companies you can’t keep…
Céline Gounder, KFF Health News’ editor-at-large for public health, discussed the results of the FDA’s largest baby formula safety test on CBS News 24/7’s The Daily Report on April 29. She also discussed how women seeking treatment for menopause symptoms are facing a shortage of estrogen patches on CBS News’ CBS Mornings on April 27….
One of the central tensions in pharmaceutical policy is the gap between what a drug is worth and what it actually costs. In theory, a drug’s price should reflect its value — its ability to improve health outcomes relative to the next best alternative. In practice, list prices are set by manufacturers, net prices are shaped by opaque…