About health insurance/insurers
States ranked by average ACA benchmark premium FYI.
Comment: In addition to differing out-of-pocket exmpnses, yhese figures help explain the different opinions about the affordability of ACA plans.
About pharma
CVS is expanding its MinuteClinics into primary care. Here's why “In a bid to ease access challenges, CVS Health will offer in-network primary care to Aetna members in certain markets through its MinuteClinics.
The services are available to certain individual plan and commercial members in Houston, San Antonio and greater Atlanta, with an eye on future expansion. There are about 1,100 MinuteClinics across the country, with the walk-in retail health clinics located at CVS pharmacies.”
Comment: How is this program different from the failing VillageMD and OakStreet ventures?
In a related article: Cigna posts $739M in Q3 profit despite taking a $1B hit from VillageMD investment
Teva fined $503 million for disparaging a rival and using patents to thwart competition “Teva Pharmaceutical, the world’s largest generic drugmaker, was fined $503 million by European antitrust regulators for delaying competition to a blockbuster multiple sclerosis medicine.
The European Commission found the company had artificially extended the patent protection of Copaxone and systematically spread misleading information about a rival product. The decision follows an investigation opened three years ago, which marked the first time the EC probed potential antitrust abuses stemming from patent procedures as well as disparaging competing products.”
About the public’s health
N95 Filtering Facepiece Respirator Reuse, Extended Use, and Filtration Efficiency “We found the number of shifts of reuse and respirator model were associated with reduced FE. While associated with minimal reduction in FE after 1 shift, after 3 shifts almost one-third of respirators did not filter 95% of particles. This reduction in FE differed by filtering facepiece respirator model.”
You may not need to throw out those ‘expired’ Covid-19 home tests “t may be tempting to throw away those tests or other Covid-19 home test kits that are labeled near their expiration dates, but the US Food and Drug Administration is encouraging people to check its website for extensions before possibly throwing away perfectly good tests.”
About healthcare IT
Teladoc CEO emphasizes course corrections as Q3 revenue, earnings beat the Street “In the Q3 earnings call, Teladoc executives stressed the stability of the U.S. virtual care segment, which has gained millions of users since last year. It called BetterHelp a "company in transition," as the company pivots hard to offset the cost of a $790 million impairment charge in the second quarter.
BetterHelp, Teladoc's virtual mental health solution, continue to drag down its performance as the segment's revenue fell 10% year-over-year, coming in at $256.8 million in Q3.”
Large Language Model Influence on Diagnostic Reasoning “In a randomized clinical trial including 50 physicians, the use of an LLM did not significantly enhance diagnostic reasoning performance compared with the availability of only conventional resources.”