Author: Peter

Getting diagnosed with cancer or another life-altering illness can overwhelm patients, who suddenly face a complex condition while worrying about their future, family and finances. The ability to quickly access prescribed specialty medicines shouldn’t add to those worries...There’s a far more efficient way to handle this, both for patients and doctors: provide the prescribed medications at the cancer clinic or academic medical center where the patient regularly goes for testing and medical appointments. Embedding a specialty pharmacy within the practice—called medically integrated dispensing dramatically improves the healthcare experience by removing the PBM-controlled specialty pharmacy from the “triangle of care”—the doctor, the patient, and the pharmacist...READ MORE

A group of 23 state attorneys general led by Florida told a federal court on Monday that the U.S. Centers for Disease Control and Prevention lacks the legal authority to impose a nationwide transportation mask mandate to address COVID-19...The CDC sought "an unprecedented masking mandate regulating every breath of millions of Americans," said the brief in support of the group that sued to overturn the mask mandate...The group, which included Arizona, Georgia, Indiana, Missouri, Ohio, Texas and Virginia, urged the appeals court to reject the CDC "overreach."...READ MORE

...Republican and Democratic senators met with the chamber's parliamentarian to discuss whether the bill's proposal for Medicare to negotiate the price of prescription drugs with manufacturers has a direct impact on government spending or tax revenue, as reconciliation rules require...But these are not negotiations. They're price controls. The bill's text sets maximum prices that the government will pay — and threatens confiscatory taxes for drug companies that refuse to comply...it will mean that fewer cutting-edge drugs are available to American patients...price controls on prescription drugs are unnecessary. Even as the price of just about everything else in our economy has soared in the past year, drug prices have been relatively flat...If lawmakers want to reduce patient drug costs meaningfully, they should train their focus on pharmacy benefit managers...PBMs keep a cut of the savings they extract and send another cut to the insurer, which may use that cut to lower overall premiums...READ MORE

Biogen’s Q2 earnings report was headlined by stronger than expected second-quarter sales for its multiple sclerosis drugs. Less touted the company’s disclosure that it had agreed in principle to pay about $900 million to settle an old whistleblower lawsuit involving some of the same products...The payment brings to a close a so-called qui tam case, initially brought in 2012, in which former Biogen sales representative Michael Bawduniak alleged that the company ran sham speaker and consultant programs between 2009 and March 2014...The suit contended that these meetings, ostensibly required for the purpose of gathering physician input, were unnecessary. Furthermore, it said the meetings were merely a vehicle for Biogen’s marketing department to shuttle kickbacks to doctors to continue prescribing the company’s drugs after the entrance of a competitor product in the MS space, Novartis’s Gilenya...READ MORE

The main U.S. drug lobby has said it will push back against the legislation, which includes policies that drugmakers have opposed for decades...The pharmaceutical industry is gearing up to minimize the effect of major drug legislation passed by Congress on Friday, the first time in many years lawmakers have overcome the drug lobby’s opposition to limits on their pricing power...the House of Representatives passed the Inflation Reduction Act in a 220-207 party-line vote, sending the bill to President Joe Biden...The bill would allow Medicare to negotiate prices on up to 60 drugs by 2029...The pharma industry spent heavily to lobby against the bill and, after decades of forestalling action to curtail the industry’s pricing power in the U.S., its main lobbying group signaled the fight would continue...READ MORE

...a new medical center in Las Vegas is hoping to eliminate similar language barriers and other obstacles that members of the Asian American Pacific Islander community face in accessing health care...The Healthy Asian & Pacific Islander Medical Center is the Asian Community Development Council’s latest effort to improve the general well-being and education of this community in Nevada, and advocate on their behalf...The center is something that Vida Lin, the nonprofit’s founder and president, felt has been missing since she moved to Las Vegas from California almost 30 years ago...READ MORE

A federal court recently exposed the rot at the heart of America's healthcare system...The case, filed in the U.S. District Court for the District of Columbia, partly revolved around the many low-income, and even middle-income, patients who receive "co-pay coupons" from drug manufacturers to help them cover their out-of-pocket costs at pharmacies...For many Americans, these coupons represent the difference between filling a prescription and going without lifesaving care. But in recent years, health insurers have started to effectively steal those coupons, leaving patients on the hook for far higher expenses. As Judge Carl Nichols noted in a May ruling, insurance companies "pocket for themselves at least some of the assistance."...Sadly, the practice is totally legal. And until lawmakers crack down on this sort of grossly immoral behavior, insurance behemoths and their allies will continue shifting costs onto patients, with disastrous consequences for individuals' health and society at large...READ MORE

MenACWY 12th Grade Requirement
What Is the Meningococcal Vaccine and Why Is It Important?
What Does This Mean for Nevada?
What Does This Mean for Pharmacists?
12th Grade MenACWY Vaccination Requirement Resources

For too many years, too few policymakers paid any attention to the 340B drug discount program, blindly accepting the myth that non-profit hospitals and other covered entities were selflessly using 340B savings to “stretch scarce federal healthcare resources” in service of our most vulnerable patients...congressional neglect has resulted in significant financial abuse. Today there is ever-increasing evidence of the program’s out-of-control scope and a growing chorus from all corners of government who are finally beginning to see the 340B drug discount program for what it has become – a moneymaker for hospitals wrapped in the rhetoric of healthcare compassion...it is possible for hospitals to use 340B profit to bolster their own bottom lines on the back of uninsured Americans. (Though it’s more common, and more lucrative, for hospitals to soak payers – commercial insurance companies, Medicaid and Medicare – with marked-up claims for 340B-discounted medicines.)...While the Health Resources and Services Administration...has refused to acknowledge that 340B is a dysfunctional program in need of reform...READ MORE

Should pharma reps keep wheeling their cases into doctors' offices? Maybe not. Video meetings are three times more effective than in-person interactions when it comes to driving new prescriptions...That’s according to a new report...which combed through data from 130 million quarterly field interactions across 80% of global biopharmas...It was an unexpected result: Video meetings, which have grown during the pandemic, work better than in-person meetings at getting new prescriptions filled. And digital leaders in the industry “are gaining an advantage using video calls up to three times a week,” the...report said...Why is video better? Partly because video meetings last longer...video calls tend to average 21 minutes, with reps using content in 85% of those meetings compared with 39% in person...READ MORE