Dozens of state attorneys general are urging Congress to pass a law prohibiting PBMs from simultaneously owning pharmacies, arguing such a move would boost competition and create more affordable prescription drug prices for Americans. Their concern is these arrangements create conflicts of interest that allow PBMs to dominate the design of health plans for tens of millions of Americans, and also distort the distribution and pricing for prescription medicines.
In the U.S., thousands of donated organs never reach the patients who need them. CBS News found that last year, one in three kidneys recovered from deceased donors were never transplanted. Specialized organ recovery teams made more than 26 million attempts to place these kidneys with transplant centers, offering them again and again in search of a suitable match--before they were ultimately discarded as medical waste. And it's not just kidneys. Nearly 12,000 potentially life-saving organs were discarded last year in the United States.
Around 250 doctors at Hennepin County Medical Center have been certified as the first unionized resident and fellow physicians in Minnesota, according to union officials. The physicians are represented by the Committee of Interns and Residents, a local of the Service Employees International Union, who said the Minnesota Bureau of Mediation Services made the certification on April 3.
Amid a potential shutdown, the CEO of the Crozer Health system in Delaware County, Pennsylvania, is stepping down. Crozer CEO Tony Esposito announced that he will step down on Friday after five and a half years as the CEO. "It has been an honor to serve alongside this talented team, and I want to thank each of you for the dedication that you bring to caring for our patients and the Delaware County community day in and day out," Esposito wrote in the email in part.
Pfizer is stopping development of its experimental oral GLP-1 drug for obesity after a patient in a trial suffered a liver injury potentially caused by the drug. The patient did not experience any symptoms, and the injury resolved after discontinuation of the drug, Pfizer said. After reviewing all clinical data for the medicine and consulting with regulators, Pfizer said it decided to halt research on it. The case occurred in a dose optimization trial, aimed at finding the highest tolerable dose in a short amount of time.
Approximately 93 million computed tomography examinations, or CT scans, are performed on 62 million patients annually in the United States — but the radiation from that process can raise the risk of future cancers. Now a new study is projecting just how many cases of cancer could be linked to CT scans. In the study, published in JAMA Internal Medicine on Monday, researchers estimate that over the lifetime of those millions of patients, about 103,000 radiation-induced cancers are projected to result from CT exams done in 2023.