Author: Peter

Nevada is taking steps toward leaving the federal healthcare.gov and setting up a separate exchange operated by the state...the Legislative Interim Finance Committee...authorized state officials to spend $1 million to prepare a request for proposals and find a private provider...Heather Korbulic, executive director of the state system, says changes are needed because healthcare.gov is steadily raising the rates it charges states that link their front-end systems to the federal exchange...Korbulic says the federal rate increases by 2019 will leave the state with almost nothing to run the front-end system...Nevada tied its state exchange to the site after...using Xerox as a contractor failed, but Korbulic says several vendors now have proven systems.

Pharmacists have once again been ranked among the most honest and ethical professionals in the United States, according to the results of the latest Gallup poll on the topic...Of the survey’s 1049 respondents, 62% rated the honesty and ethical standards of pharmacists as “high” or “very high.” This percentage of favorable responses was the fifth highest of the survey, with nurses (82%) taking the top spot for the 16th year in a row...Pharmacists performed slightly better on the survey last year, earning favorable scores from 67% of participants in 2016...Other highly rated professionals included in the survey were military officers (71%), grade school teachers (66%), and medical doctors (65%). Lobbyists received the lowest score, with only 8% of survey respondents giving them a favorable rating and 58% considering their ethical and honesty standards to be “low” or “very low.”1

Rite Aid...has now transferred 1,114 stores to Walgreens Boots Alliance as part of a larger deal with the nation’s largest pharmacy chain...In all, Walgreens will over the next few weeks buy 1,932 stores and three distribution centers from Rite Aid for nearly $4.4 billion in cash. Rite Aid...has received “cash proceeds of $2.424 billion, which the company continues to use to reduce debt.”...Before agreeing in September to buy 1,932 Rite Aids, Walgreens had been trying to buy all of Rite Aid before antitrust scrutiny from the Federal Trade Commission that ultimately led to the deal’s undoing...As a smaller pharmacy chain, Rite Aid is focusing on eight states largely on the East and West Coats with plans to invest heavily in its pharmacy benefit manager EnvisionRx, which works with employers and government health programs like Medicare to better control drug costs. PBMs are the middlemen between drug makers and patients when it comes to buying prescription drugs and getting discounts for their customers.

Trump administration regulators are not ready to sign off on CVS Health's $69 billion deal to acquire Aetna...The Department of Justice asked the firms to provide more information on Thursday, just as the 30 day waiting period under Hart Scott Rodino Act expired...So far, the Trump administration has shown it's not receptive to vertical integration deals...The DOJ's second notice request extends the waiting period on the CVS-Aetna deal for another 30 days. In the meantime, the firms have scheduled shareholder votes to approve the deal for March 20th.

Wearable device identifies convulsive epileptic seizures and sends alerts to caregivers...The FDA has cleared the Embrace smart watch (Empatica, Inc.) for use by patients with epilepsy. Embrace uses advanced machine learning to monitor for the most dangerous kinds of seizures, known as “grand mal” or “generalized tonic-clonic” seizures, and sends an alert to summon caregivers’ help...The smart watch stands apart from any seizure detection system in that it measures multiple indicators of a seizure. Its unique property is its use of electrodermal activity, a signal used by stress researchers to quantify physiological changes related to sympathetic nervous system activity, also known as the "fight-or-flight" response. Embrace has been approved in Europe as a medical device for seizure monitoring and alert since April 2017.

Nicole Crisano, PTNN. This weekly video program provides our readers with an in-depth review of the latest news, product approvals, FDA rulings and more.

CVS Health...said...it plans to use more than $1 billion in benefits from a new corporate tax cut to boost wages and benefits for workers and reduce debt from its purchase of Aetna...The drugstore chain is gaining $1.2 billion in overall annual tax savings from the Tax Cuts and Jobs Act passed last year....CVS plans to use $425 million annually to increase the starting wage for hourly employees to $11 an hour , freeze employee health premiums for a year and create a new parental leave program...CVS' annualized tax benefit will also be directed toward “data analytics, care management solutions and store service offering pilots to improve health outcomes and lower costs for patients, as well as on debt reduction related to its planned acquisition of Aetna...

No one doubts that Teva Pharmaceutical Industries CEO Kare Schultz has been making all the right moves to turn around the troubled drug maker’s dwindling fortunes...Burdened by more than $32 billion in debt from past acquisitions, the world’s largest generic drug maker is cutting costs at feverish pace. The company suspended dividend payments to investors, amended debt covenants and eliminated low-value research projects...hopes for 2018 just got dashed to pieces...Following the delivery of estimate-beating fourth quarter financial results early Thursday, Teva unveiled full-year sales and profit forecasts for 2018 that were a sliver of what had been expected by Wall Street analysts, due largely to falling prices for its U.S. drugs...Teva now sees 2018 revenue falling between 16% and 18% and expects to earn as little as $2.25 a share this year...

Laura Joszt, assistant managing editor at The American Journal of Managed Care. Welcome to This Week in Managed Care from the Managed Markets News Network

When the topic of drug prices comes up, as it so often does in this post-Martin Shkreli world, pharma is always prepared with a rebuttal...Pharma CEOs are now touting that the use of medicines lowers other health-care spending...Studies have shown some truth to the claim, but critics say the support doesn't go that far...most often, pharmaceuticals have the effect of improving or maintaining an individual's health...for example, taking antibiotics to prevent a more severe infection or adhering to medication to manage a chronic condition like diabetes or high blood pressure...In either of those circumstances, taking the medication may also avert hospital admissions and thus reduce the use of medical services...