The U.S. Federal Trade Commission on Wednesday gave its blessing, with conditions, to the long-stalled $4.3 billion merger of a subsidiary of Denver-based dialysis provider DaVita Inc. with Optum, a health services company owned by insurance giant UnitedHealth Group.
Amazon is seeking to contract directly with health plans and employers to sell prescription drugs through its PillPack subsidiary, a move that would cut out existing pharmacy benefit managers and potentially reshape the sale and distribution of medicines in the U.S., according to newly surfaced court documents.
Roughly one in every six times someone is taken to an emergency room or checks in to the hospital, the treatment is followed by a “surprise” medical bill, according to a study released Thursday. And depending on where you live, the odds can be much higher.
All of us in California should get behind the opportunity to protect patients from out-of-insurance-network health care bills. That’s why it is unfortunate that some in the Legislature want to couple this unifying issue of helping patients with other controversial and polarizing issues that threaten the outcome.
The voters of Fayette County have spoken, and they've said that they don’t need a hospital in this rural community of 25,000 people, one hour southeast of Austin—or at least not enough to pay for it. In a landslide vote Thursday night, county residents overwhelmingly rejected a proposition to create a taxing district for St. Mark's Medical Center in La Grange, which would have kept the deeply indebted hospital open for the foreseeable future.
Just being a pharmacy -- even a modern one that sells everything from healthcare supplies to food, as-seen-on-TV products, and who knows what else -- may not be enough to survive the retail apocalypse. Consumers can get nearly anything online that they could pick up at a CVS Health or Walgreens, so the drugstore chains need to adapt.