About health insurance/insurers
18% drop since 2020 in people with reported medical debt “The number of people with medical debt on their credit reports fell by 8.2 million — or 17.9% — between 2020 and 2022, according to a report Tuesday from the U.S. Consumer Financial Protection Bureau.
White House officials said in a separate draft report that the two-year drop likely stems from their policies. Among the programs they say contributed to less debt was an expansion of the Obama-era healthcare law that added 4.2 million people with some form of health insurance. Also, local governments are leveraging $16 million in coronavirus relief funds to wipe out $1.5 billion worth of medical debt.
There has also been a persistent effort by the CFPB to reduce medical debt. The major credit rating agencies said last year that they will no longer include in their reports medical debts under $500 or debts that were already repaid.”
About hospitals and healthcare systems
Most board members at the nation's top hospitals have no healthcare background Highlights:
—”Among the 529 board members, 44 percent had a background in finance. Among them, more than 80 percent led private equity funds, wealth management firms, or multinational banks. The remainder were in real estate (14.7 percent) or insurance (5.2 percent).
—The second and third most common sectors were health services (16.4 percent) and professional and business services (12.6 percent).
—Across the 15 hospitals, 14.6 percent of board members were healthcare professionals — primarily physicians (13.3 percent) and followed by nurses (0.9 percent).”
Comment: This distribution provides insight into what hospitals want their boards to do. The results indicate help with financial management or fund raising.
About pharma
After J&J's Texas two-step stumble, another talc plaintiff heads to trial: report “Following a hold on nearly 40,000 lawsuits alleging J&J’s talc products cause cancer, U.S. bankruptcy judge Michael Kaplan on Tuesday agreed to let plaintiff Anthony Hernandez Valadez proceed with his case against the drug behemoth in California…”
Competition And Vulnerabilities In The Global Supply Chain For US Generic Active Pharmaceutical Ingredients “The US supply of generic drugs is heavily dependent on the global supply chain for sources of generic active pharmaceutical ingredients (APIs) for the US pharmaceutical market….We identified a total of 565 facilities producing 1,379 unique generic APIs across forty-two countries. India, China, and Italy were the top producers; 14 percent of APIs were manufactured in the US. About a third of APIs were manufactured by a single facility, and another third were manufactured by two or three facilities. More than one in every five APIs reflected markets in which current Food and Drug Administration standards would have failed to detect low competition because there were three or fewer API manufacturers despite there being four or more manufacturers of finished generic drugs.”
CMMI releases three new models aimed at lower generic, novel drug costs “The three models initially chosen will test:
Creating new payment methods for drugs put on the market via accelerated approval, a pathway that lets the Food and Drug Administration (FDA) clear drugs which address unmet medical needs. The agency would create new methods that would encourage drugmakers to complete confirmatory trials as well as boost ‘access to post-market safety and efficacy data. This would reduce Medicare spending on drugs that have no confirmed clinical benefit,’ according to a release. CMS decided to narrowly cover a new class of Alzheimer’s disease drugs for Medicare beneficiaries in a confirmatory clinical trial.
A list of generic drugs for which the out-of-pocket Part D costs will be capped at $2 a month per drug. The goal of the model is to encourage Part D plans to lower cost-sharing on ‘relatively inexpensive generic medications that have significant clinical benefits, but cost-sharing can vary widely across insurance plans based on the specific formulation a doctor prescribes,’ a release said.
A model to address the skyward cost of gene and cell therapies for diseases like sickle cell and cancer that can come with a price tag of up to $1 million. The goal is for state Medicaid agencies to assign CMS to ‘coordinate and administer multi-state, outcomes-based agreements with manufacturers for certain cell and gene therapies,’ CMS said.”