About health insurance/insurers
2024 Employer Health Benefits Survey This annual KFF report is the best source for data on the employer-sponsored health benefit market.
In a related article: Health Benefits In 2024: Higher Premiums Persist, Employer Strategies For GLP-1 Coverage And Family-Building Benefits “In 2024, the average annual premium for employer-sponsored family health coverage was $25,572, an increase of $1,604 (7 percent) from 2023. Over the course of the past five years, the average family premium has increased 24 percent, which is similar to growth seen in inflation (23 percent) and wages (28 percent). On average, covered workers contributed 16 percent ($1,368) of the cost of single coverage and 25 percent ($6,296) of the cost of family coverage. The average general annual deductible for single coverage for workers with a deductible was $1,787, similar to that in recent years but 47 percent higher than a decade ago. In 2024, 18 percent of large firms offering health benefits, including 28 percent of those with 5,000 or more employees, covered GLP-1 antagonists for weight loss. Large employers were more likely to perceive their overall provider networks as broader than their networks for mental health and substance use conditions.”
ACA Provision Linked to Improved Survival in Young Adult Cancer Patients “After the Dependent Care Expansion was enacted, the cancer death rate declined more rapidly among patients who were 19-25 years of age than among those who were 12-18 years or 26-32 years of age.”
Healthcare billing fraud: 12 recent cases FYI. All are results of a fee-for-service system’s incentives.
About pharma
GSK dodges courtroom showdown with $2.2B Zantac settlement “GSK has agreed to pay up to $2.2 billion to resolve some 80,000 US state court cases related to its discontinued heartburn medication Zantac (ranitidine) and its alleged links to cancer. The settlement announced on Wednesday covers 93% of the pending Zantac-related cases against GSK in US state courts.”
Medicare $2 Drug List Model – Request for Information (RFI) – Responses Due December 9, 2024 “The Innovation Center’s Medicare $2 Drug List Model proposes testing whether a simplified approach to offering low-cost, clinically important generic drugs can improve medication adherence, lead to better outcomes, and improve beneficiary and prescriber satisfaction with the Part D benefit.”
The RFI has a list of proposed medications.
About healthcare IT
Nobel Prize in Chemistry awarded to 3 scientists for predicting and designing proteins “The Nobel Prizes are embracing the AI hype. A day after the Physics prize was given to two scientists for foundational work on machine learning, the Nobel Prize in Chemistry has been awarded to three scientists who used advanced computational methods to solve a decades-old problem: understanding how proteins fold together into three-dimensional shapes.
Half of the 2024 Chemistry prize goes to David Baker, Ph.D., “for computational protein design” while the other half is split between Demis Hassabis, Ph.D., and John Jumper, Ph.D., “for protein structure prediction.”
Evaluating the use of large language models to provide clinical recommendations in the Emergency Department “Here, we conduct a highly-powered study to determine whether LLMs can provide clinical recommendations for three tasks (admission status, radiological investigation(s) request status, and antibiotic prescription status) using clinical notes from the Emergency Department. We randomly selected 10,000 Emergency Department visits to evaluate the accuracy of zero-shot, GPT-3.5-turbo- and GPT-4-turbo-generated clinical recommendations across four different prompting strategies. We found that both GPT-4-turbo and GPT-3.5-turbo performed poorly compared to a resident physician, with accuracy scores 8% and 24%, respectively, lower than physician on average. Both LLMs tended to be overly cautious in its recommendations, with high sensitivity at the cost of specificity.” [Emphasis added]