As a loyal Wall Street Journal subscriber, I was invited to attend the Wall Street Journal’s Health Forum today gratis. I did so virtually.
Journal reports interviewed health experts, such as Chelsea Clinton and Food and Drug Commissioner Dr. Robert Califf, as well as the chief executive officers of Moderna, Biogen, One Medical, and Mass General Brigham, among others
One session concerned aging. A reporter interviewed three experts, who argued among themselves. Death and taxes, right?
The FEHBlog enjoyed the opportunity to listen to the Health Forum. He continues to think that FEHBP plans who don’t try to connect their members with in-network primary care providers are missing the boat.
Also, from the public health front, the Washington Post reports
Diabetes and obesity are rising among young adults in the United States, an alarming development that puts them at higher risk for heart disease, according to a study of 13,000 people between 20 and 44 years old.
The authors of the study, published Sunday in a major medical journal, warn the trends could have major public health implications: a rising generation dying prematurely of heart attacks, strokes and other complications. And Black and Hispanic people, particularly Mexican Americans, would bear the brunt.
“We’re witnessing a smoldering public health crisis,” Rishi K. Wadhera, assistant professor of medicine at Harvard Medical School and one of the study authors, wrote in an email.
The Wall Street Journal adds
WW International Inc., known as WeightWatchers, is buying digital health company Sequence, marking the diet company’s move into the hot market for diabetes and obesity drugs including Ozempic and Wegovy.
Sequence is a subscription service that offers telehealth visits with doctors who can prescribe the drugs. WeightWatchers, which has long promised to help customers lose weight through food-tracking and lifestyle changes, is moving to also offer customers a medical weight-loss approach.
STAT News notes
The obesity revolution is just getting started. Long framed as a failure of willpower and the price of poor lifestyle decisions, obesity is now more often viewed as a biological disease — one that new drugs can treat. But as people clamor for Ozempic and Mounjaro, conceived to treat diabetes, concern is rising that in the rush to prescribe them, the root causes of obesity may be overlooked, including environmental factors. And eating-disorder experts worry people’s body images could be further stigmatized.
This is a moment reminiscent of other pharma turning points, such as when Valium and Prozac changed how people perceived anxiety and depression. But both the social media buzz and pharma’s marketing — including attempts to shape medical school curricula, STAT has learned — raise fears that treating obesity could be taken too far, draining health care dollars along the way. Read more from STAT’s Elaine Chen and Matthew Herper in the first of a series.
Lilly decided to reduce its insulin prices to avoid Inflation Reduction Act penalties.
Eli Lilly would’ve had to pay Medicaid about $150 for each vial of insulin used in the program if it hadn’t dramatically cut the list prices for some of its older products this week.
The company was about to run into a Medicaid penalty for hiking the price of its drugs faster than the rate of inflation. Now that it plans to lower the list price of the insulin Humalog 70%, it won’t trigger that penalty. Lilly also is lowering the price of Lispro, a biosimilar of Humalog, to $25 a vial.
In other Rx coverage news, USA Today tells us
More than a quarter of Americans over 40 take medications to lower their cholesterol, most of them statins. But not everyone can tolerate statins or wants to.
Now a new study confirms that bempedoic acid, approved in 2020, not only lowers cholesterol but also reduces the risk for heart attack and stroke.
Statins will remain the first therapy patients are given to lower cholesterol. But the news means more people will likely be prescribed a once-daily pill of bempedoic acid.
Bempedoic acid is sold under the brand name Nexletol from Esperion Therapeutics of Ann Arbor, Michigan. It is sold with another drug, ezetimibe as Nexlizet.
From the U.S. healthcare business front, Healthcare Dive informs us
- Transcarent, a healthcare platform for self-insured employers, has agreed to acquire the majority of on-demand virtual care platform 98point6, including its almost 100-clinician physician group, in a deal worth up to $100 million.
- Transcarent will get 98point6’s self-insured employer business, affiliated physician group and a software license, while the remaining 98point6 will rebrand as 98point6 Technologies and focus on licensing its software to third-party providers.
- Seattle-based 98point6 bills itself as an artificial intelligence-enabled chatbot that collects patient information and summarizes it for a physician, who continues the conversation. The transaction is expected to close by the end of March.