News & Blogs

For Big Insurers, Tomorrow’s Congressional Hearings Is the Super Bowl

If I were still in my role as a Cigna executive, one of my responsibilities would be to prepare CEO David Cordani for his first ever appearance before a Congressional committee tomorrow. When I was the VP of corporate communications, I wrote speeches for the CEO and staffed him for any public-facing appearances. I was also the gatekeeper. Reporters had to go through me to interview anyone at Cigna, and I would rarely allow a reporter…

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UnitedHealth Used Aggressive Tactics to Boost Medicare Payments, Senate Report Finds

UnitedHealth Group deployed aggressive tactics to collect payment-boosting diagnoses for its Medicare Advantage members, a Senate committee investigating the company’s practices said. In Medicare Advantage, the federal government pays insurers a lump sum to oversee medical benefits for seniors and disabled people. The government pays extra for patients with certain costly medical conditions, a process called risk adjustment. The new report, based on a review of 50,000 pages of records UnitedHealth turned over to the Senate…

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Drugmakers Are Ditching Middlemen to Sell Directly to Patients

Drugmakers are moving to sell their medicines directly to patients, abandoning the middlemen they have long relied on. The shift is a huge departure from how pharmaceutical companies including Eli Lilly, Novo Nordisk and Pfizer have sold drugs for decades and threatens the multibillion-dollar business of firms that have traditionally filled prescriptions. It is saving some patients hundreds of dollars off the cost of prescriptions because companies have been lowering the prices for drugs sold directly.

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Trump Strikes a Good Drug Deal

President Trump struck a deal on Monday with the U.K.’s Labour government that will raise drug prices on the other side of the pond in return for a tariff reprieve. At last a good drug deal: Both sides can claim a victory while mitigating self-inflicted damage to their countries. The President has long complained, with some justification, that other developed countries free-ride on U.S. innovation and consumers by requiring manufacturers to sell drugs to government-run…

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Biden’s IRA Is Harming Cancer Patients

Democrats’ 2022 Inflation Reduction Act wasn’t designed to kill cancer innovation, but new evidence reveals that’s what it’s doing. The law strongly discourages drug companies from performing the “follow-on” research after initial discoveries that accounts for a disproportionate share of progress in the fight against cancer. The crux of the problem is that the IRA imposes price caps that shorten the effective life of a patent and applies those price controls even to later-approved uses.…

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Health is the Biggest Affordability Challenge

Thanks to decades of bad policy – and four years of Bidenomics – America is facing an affordability crisis. The news media tends to focus on the cost of groceries as the heart of the problem. But high grocery bills are a symptom, not the cause. The greatest long-term cause of the affordability problem is the cost of health insurance. The Democrats say they want to lower health insurance costs – and they think extending…

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UnitedHealth, Cigna and Elevance’s House of Cards Is Wobbling

We’ve reported over the past few weeks about actions being taken by UnitedHealth Group, Cigna and Elevance, three of the giants in the for-profit health insurance business, that undoubtedly will push independent physician practices to the brink of bankruptcy and closure – or force them to sell out to either an insurance conglomerate or big hospital system – and severely restrict Americans’ access to the doctors and hospitals of their choice. Other Big Insurance companies undoubtedly will…

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The simplest way to make American life affordable again

Americans have delivered the same message in the last two elections: make life affordable again. They are tired of working harder for less, while the cost of everything — from housing to education to insurance — keeps rising. The affordability crisis touches every household, and its biggest driver is the one Washington refuses to tackle seriously: healthcare. Healthcare now consumes nearly one-fifth of our economy. It is the largest single cost for employers, the fastest-growing…

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