insurance
Medicare Advantage cuts on deck
It's been a busy news week on the MA beat, and luckily my colleague Bob Herman has been covering every big announcement this week. The latest: Medicare Advantage insurers could face an average 2.3% cut to baseline payments in 2024, the Biden administration said Wednesday. That could be a cut of more than $3 billion to the industry, Bob writes.
The major reason behind the proposed pay cut: Medicare officials want to update data and coding systems that are used to explain the health conditions of an insurance company's enrollees.
The document released Wednesday is just the beginning of a two-month lobbying frenzy by insurance companies. The final rule will come out by April 3. Get all the details here.
addiction
Are venture capitalists turning a blind eye to addiction?
U.S. addiction deaths are hovering at all-time highs, but the venture capital world has shown remarkably little interest in developing new cures, according to a new report from the biotechnology lobbying group BIO, my colleague Lev Facher reports.
V.C. firms have invested 270 times more money in the past decade into cancer cures than potential addiction treatments, according to the report. But further investment is sorely needed because the few addiction drug candidates that do reach clinical trials fail with astonishing frequency: 93% of phase 2 trials for opioid addiction drugs failed, at BIO's last count.
There aren't exactly a lot of existing options, either. There are currently just three FDA-approved drugs to treat opioid addiction, and none to treat addiction to cocaine or methamphetamine. Given the current pipeline and investment landscape, the D.C. trade association doesn't expect that to change anytime soon. Read more here.
covid-19 policy
Test-to-treat no more
The FDA has changed its emergency use authorization for Pfizer's Paxlovid Covid-19 antiviral, the agency announced yesterday, so that health care providers no longer have to see a positive test to prescribe the treatment.
The agency was trying to accommodate situations in which someone might have a known, direct Covid-19 exposure and develop symptoms, but still test negative — a scenario that's particularly important if the person in question is high-risk, the FDA said.
White House Covid-19 Coordinator Ashish Jha told Eric Topol, the founder and director of the Scripps Research Translational Institute, last week that the White House is concerned about a low rate of Paxlovid use among people over age 75, in particular. Pfizer has estimated sales of $8 billion for the drug for 2023.
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