Author: Scott Welch
Starting next year the highest-grossing drug of all time, AbbVie ABBV -0.56%decrease; red down pointing triangle‘s Humira, will finally face competition from copycat biologics in the U.S. Yet the makers of the complex generics known as biosimilars won’t necessarily be the biggest winners. The top beneficiaries could instead be the middlemen such as Cigna CI 0.29%increase; green up pointing triangle and CVS Health CVS 0.16%increase; ...
New legislation seeks to improve the Medicare & You handbook in the latest attempt by Congress to scrutinize how Medicare Advantage plans are marketed to seniors. The legislation introduced Tuesday by Sens. Maggie Hassan, D-N.H., and Roger Marshall, R-Kan., would add new information to the handbook on health plan choices and supplemental insurance. It is ...
Private payers can just say “no.” So can Medicare. Medicaid, however, must say “yes.” Medicaid must provide coverage for any medication approved by the Food and Drug Administration (FDA), even those medications approved under the FDA’s accelerated approval program (AAP), which are often very expensive medications that lack complete clinical data, according to a special commentary in ...
For more than 2 decades, the Kaiser Family Foundation (KFF) has produced an invaluable annual survey of employer-sponsored insurance (ESI). This year’s report, which the authors summarized in a companion article published in Health Affairs, provides insights into key characteristics of the insurance model that most working-age Americans and their families rely on to access medical services.
Thanksgiving is right around the corner, bringing with it opportunities for festivities with family and friends. But this year’s holiday happenings also risk attracting some unwelcome guests, as respiratory viruses and the coronavirus could find fertile ground to spread, especially in crowded indoor settings.
About 22,000 nurses and nurse practitioners reached a tentative agreement with Kaiser Permanente on a new four-year contract that includes provisions for a 22.5% raise and increased staffing.
While the name of the game in employee perks nowadays is flexibility, employees are searching for other perks, too. In particular, many workers are now planning to take advantage of voluntary benefits like critical illness, hospital indemnity, disability income, and accident insurance.
On the heels of several high-profile acquisitions, Walgreens aims to be a point of entry for consumers for healthcare services ranging from urgent care to specialty care and even in-home health. Walgreen’s VillageMD unit recently announced it was buying another urgent and primary care chain, Summit Health-CityMD, in a deal worth close to $9 billion. The ...
This spring, Chevron workers testified that the company revoked health coverage for hundreds of members of the United Steelworkers Local 5 at the Richmond, California, refinery during a strike that ultimately lasted two months. Thousands of nurses at Stanford Health Care were told in April they would lose their health insurance if they did not return to work during ...
Millions of Americans have been signing up for health insurance at their companies in recent weeks. But for some full-time workers, particularly in certain industries like construction, job-based coverage isn’t an option for them. This divide was even more evident as the job market roared back to life in 2021 after steep losses early in the Covid-19 pandemic. Though the number ...