Month: February 2023
The Biden administration has started allowing state Medicaid funds to be used to pay for groceries and dietary advice in an effort to promote better overall health and wellness among the population and to decrease the need for expensive medical interventions. Supporters of the effort, first reported by the Wall Street Journal, believe that utilizing medical ...
The Biden administration rolled out new guidance to drugmakers for meeting a new requirement to dole out rebates if their prices on Medicare Parts B and D go above inflation. The guidance, released Thursday by the Department of Health and Human Services (HHS), implements a key part of the Inflation Reduction Act passed last year. ...
Employer-sponsored health plans pay significantly more than Medicare for costly physician-administered drugs, threatening access to lifesaving treatments, according to a newly published analysis of claims data and Medicare files. What they found: Price markups increased between 2016 and 2020 for five of the top 10 drugs that account for the most spending and more than doubled ...
President Joe Biden focused on infrastructure, supporting the middle class, protecting Medicare and Social Security and what he called a “blue-collar blueprint to rebuild America” in his 1-hour and 13-minute State of the Union speech last night. In the longest section of the speech devoted to healthcare, which occurred at about the halfway point, he called for expanding the ...
The Pill Club, an online women’s pharmacy, has reached an $18.3 million settlement with California authorities over claims it defrauded the state’s Medicaid program by prescribing birth control pills without adequate consultation and shipping tens of thousands of female condoms to customers who didn’t want them. Attorney General Rob Bonta announced the agreement Tuesday, a ...
Senate Republican Leader Mitch McConnell said any idea on sunsetting Social Security and Medicare belongs to Sen. Rick Scott—not the GOP. “Unfortunately, that was the Scott plan, that’s not a Republican plan,” McConnell said on a Kentucky radio program. McConnell’s comments about Scott, a GOP rival, come as the White House continues to spotlight how Republicans heckled — and apparently committed ...
The notion that people will regularly use computers to diagnose their own illnesses has been discussed for decades. Of course, millions of people try to do that today, consulting Dr. Google, though often with little success. Given the low quality of many online health sources, such searches may even be harmful. Some governments have even launched “Don’t ...
Pregnant and scared, Natasha Valle went to a Tennova Healthcare hospital in Clarksville, Tennessee, in January 2021 because she was bleeding. She didn’t know much about miscarriage, but this seemed like one. In the emergency room, she was examined then sent home, she said. She went back when her cramping became excruciating. Then home again. ...
There’s plenty of mystique tied to chocolate. Over the centuries, cocoa has been touted as an aphrodisiac and a health elixir. The Mayans even used cocoa as a form of cash and buried their aristocrats with it. It appears they believed that “it helped people get into the afterlife and survive in the afterlife,” says Nat Bletter, an ethnobotanist and chocolate-maker. ...
House Republicans on Monday began their promised scrutiny of the origins of the coronavirus pandemic, requesting testimony from Anthony Fauci and current Biden administration officials, along with classified briefings and documents from US intelligence agencies. The new Select Subcommittee on the Coronavirus Pandemic essentially seeks to bring more emphasis to theories that the spread of ...