A major Medicare Advantage company has paid the government more than $342 million to help settle allegations that it overcharged the federal healthcare program for years. Elevance Health, which covers about 2 million people on Medicare, sent the money to the Centers for Medicare & Medicaid Services via wire transfer on May 27, court records…
(Oona Zenda/KFF Health News) A professional in-home caregiver lost her coverage for Zepbound. She soon realized getting it back was not straightforward. “I was like: ‘What am I going to do? Hopefully I can just continue keeping this weight off.’” — Deborah Finley, 50, of Lodi, California Deborah Finley, 50, of Lodi, California, said her…
One of the most interesting follows on Linkedin is Warris Bokhari from Claimable. He’s a British MD, who has had stints not only as a doc in the UK, but also as a health tech and health insurance exec in the US. But now he’s at war with the system, in particular working for patients…
Fiore et al. (2026) just released their annual national health expenditure projections in Health Affairs. I summarize some of the key findings in Q&A format. How much is the US currently spending on health care? $5.7 trillion. This is represents an increase in healthcare spending as a share of GDP from 18.0% in 2024 to…
Sen. Ron Wyden and 14 Democratic co-sponsors plan to introduce legislation Thursday to cap consumers’ potential out-of-pocket costs in traditional Medicare, resurfacing a long-running debate over why the program doesn’t limit beneficiary spending. Even the bill’s backers say securing passage this year is a long shot. But the effort is one more opportunity for Democrats…
WHITESBURG, Ky. — Drugs and the consequences of addiction are woven into the fabric of Jamie Madden’s life. Her earliest memory is of standing on the passenger seat of her dad’s car as a toddler, wearing a peach-colored blouse, while he drove from their Kentucky home to Florida to pick up drugs. On a stop…
By MICHAEL MILLENSON It took 129 years for the inalienable rights proclaimed in America’s Declaration of Independence to apply to the rights of patients in relationship to their doctors. In 1905, an Illinois appellate court ruled in favor of a woman who’d sued her surgeon for performing a hysterectomy without disclosing in advance what procedure…
That is the title of my new Health Affairs Forefront piece out today with Lou Garrison and Richard Xie. An excerpt from the article is below: United States policy makers increasingly argue that Americans pay too much for prescription drugs. In a recent report, the Senate Health, Education, Labor, and Pensions (HELP) Committee minority staff contended…
Angel Foster had a backup plan. It was the first weekend in May. A federal appeals court had just made it illegal to mail mifepristone, a pill that’s part of the most widely used abortion method in the U.S. But Foster, a doctor who specializes in reproductive health, was prepared. As leader of the Massachusetts…
One afternoon in late 2024, a sixth-grader nicknamed Bug came home from school with an announcement to make. Bug, who was assigned female at birth, told his parents he was a boy — and would be using he/him pronouns. “OK, cool,” his mother, J, remembered saying. (J asked to be identified by only her first…