Democratic senators on Wednesday took a formal step toward reviving President Joe Biden’s economic agenda, starting with a measure to let Medicare negotiate prices with drugmakers and to curb rising drug costs more broadly. A similar proposal died in December when Sen. Joe Manchin (D-W.Va.) decided to oppose Biden’s $1.9 trillion Build Back Better bill, ...

Mark Cuban, the billionaire owner of the Dallas Mavericks and “Shark Tank” star, has a new online pharmacy that could make your prescription medications more affordable. In January, Cuban announced the launch of the Mark Cuban Cost Plus Drug Company. Currently, 150 generic prescription medications are available on the pharmacy website, costplusdrugs.com. Medications are priced at ...

The Centers for Medicare & Medicaid Services is responding to the chaos of the covid-19 pandemic by proposing to hide from the public a rating that lets consumers compare hospitals’ safety records and to waive approximately $350 million in financial penalties for roughly 750 hospitals with the worst patient-safety track records. CMS’ chief medical officer, Dr. Lee Fleisher, said those ...

An analysis of three existing payment models found certain screening tools and other designs led to some Medicare beneficiaries being excluded and prompted the creation of a new guide on how to root out bias in models. Researchers with the Center for Medicare and Medicaid Innovation (CMMI) outlined in a Health Affairs article troubling instances of implicit ...

As of July 1, employer-sponsored plans will be required to comply with transparency requirements first passed in 2020. But questions remain over whether these new rules will truly help consumers.

The number of coronavirus cases reported in California is on the brink of crossing 10 million, a milestone that probably undercounts the total significantly yet still carries an increasing sense of inevitability.