Author: Scott Welch
Consumers who try to buy popular weight loss drugs online without a prescription risk being scammed or receiving unsafe products, a new study shows. About 42% of online pharmacies that sell semaglutide, the active ingredient in Novo Nordisk’s anti-obesity drug Wegovy, are illegal, operating without a valid license and selling medications without prescriptions, according to a ...
One possible symptom of hospital consolidation, exhaustion or confusion: Fewer have star ratings from the Centers for Medicare and Medicaid Services. The number of hospitals that sent CMS enough of the right data to be graded on the agency’s five-star quality rating system fell to 2,847 this year, down 7.4% from the number that earned ...
Nearly half of Americans with health insurance said they received a recent medical bill or a charge that “should have been free or covered by their insurance,” according to a survey released Thursday. The survey, from the Commonwealth Fund in New York City, found 45% of working-age consumers last year were erroneously billed, however, fewer than half ...
The Biden administration has finalized proposed payment rates for inpatient services in the coming year, and they’re not likely to be welcomed by hospitals. Initially, the Centers for Medicare & Medicaid Services (CMS) proposed a 2.6% payment increase for 2025, which providers decried as inadequate. In the final Inpatient Prospective Payment System (IPPS) rule, that ...
Cigna CEO David Cordani mounted a defense of pharmacy benefit managers during the company’s earnings call on Thursday morning as regulators and critics turn up the heat on the industry. Cigna owns Express Scripts, which along with CVS’ Caremark and UnitedHealth Group’s Optum Rx, dominate the PBM space. Cordani said that pharmacological innovation is a ...
Amazon is still so enthusiastic about the idea of expanding its health care operations that it accepted $1 billion in projected 2024 health care losses back in December, according to Eugene Kim of Business Insider. Kim reported, based on internal documents, that Amazon also projected that health care unit revenue would increase 30%, to $3 ...
Technology that identifies people at risk of a heart attack in the next 10 years has been hailed as “game changing” by scientists. The artificial intelligence (AI) model detects inflammation in the heart that does not show up on CT scans, which involve a combination of X-rays and computer technology. A pilot project, supported by ...
The government subsidy to Part D plans is shifting from being reconciled on the backend to a larger risk-adjusted payment upfront.
Premiums for health insurance sold through the state’s marketplace will increase by nearly 8% in 2025, Covered California officials announced Wednesday.
The enhanced subsidies available for Affordable Care Act plans have been the key to driving massive enrollment growth, and rolling them back would likely lead to a massive spike in premium payments, according to a new report.