The introduction of AI and machine learning is transforming the healthcare landscape by offering data-driven, personalized tech solutions that can analyze complex datasets. Doctors can use AI to analyze genetic data, lifestyle choices and wearable metrics to identify health risks early, which enables a shift to proactive, preventive care that could help extend lifespans and improve one's overall quality of life.
After two years of haggling, Congress has nearly reached a deal to rein in the drug-industry middlemen known as pharmacy benefit managers. Lawmakers agreed to extend telehealth flexibilities, fund public health programs, and enact these major PBM changes as part of a government funding package they are planning to pass before the end of the year, according to four health care industry sources and two congressional aides. The language of the government funding package has not been publicly released, and could still change.
Americans spend more time living with diseases than people from other countries, according to a new study. The AMA's latest findings show that Americans live with diseases for an average of 12.4 years. Mental and substance-use disorders, as well as musculoskeletal diseases, are main contributors to the years lived with disability in the U.S., per the study. Women in the U.S. exhibited a 2.6-year higher so-called healthspan-lifespan gap (representing the number of years spent sick) than men, increasing from 12.2 to 13.7 years or 32% beyond the global mean for women. The latest overall healthspan-lifespan gap in the U.S. marks an increase from 10.9 years in 2000 to 12.4 years in 2024, resulting in a 29% higher gap than the global mean.
Powerful weight-loss drugs are expanding use of U.S. healthcare as patients starting prescriptions are diagnosed with obesity-related conditions or take the drugs to become eligible for other services, health records and discussions with doctors show. An exclusive analysis of hundreds of thousands of electronic patient records by health data firm Truveta found slight, but measurable, increases in first-time diagnoses of sleep apnea, cardiovascular disease, and type 2 diabetes within 15 days of an initial prescription for a GLP-1 weight-loss drug between 2020 and 2024. In addition to obesity-related conditions, some patients are being prescribed the drugs to lose weight and become eligible for services, including organ transplants, fertility treatments or knee replacements, according to interviews with seven doctors and five other health experts.
For years, P.B.M.s took payments from opioid manufacturers, including Purdue Pharma, in return for not restricting the flow of pills. As tens of thousands of Americans overdosed and died from prescription painkillers, the middlemen collected billions of dollars in payments. The details of these backroom deals — laid out in hundreds of documents, some previously confidential, reviewed by The Times — expose a mostly untold chapter of the opioid epidemic and provide a rare look at the modus operandi of the companies at the heart of the prescription drug supply chain. The P.B.M.s exert extraordinary control over what drugs people can receive and at what price. The three dominant companies — Express Scripts, CVS Caremark and Optum Rx — oversee prescriptions for more than 200 million people and are part of health care conglomerates that sit near the top of the Fortune 500 list. The P.B.M.s are hired by insurers and employers to control their drug costs by negotiating discounts with pharmaceutical manufacturers. But a Times investigation this year found that they often pursue their own financial interests in ways that increase costs for patients, employers and government programs, while driving independent pharmacies out of business. Regulators have accused the largest P.B.M.s of anticompetitive practices. The middlemen’s dealings with opioid makers reveal a lesser-known consequence of this pay-to-play system: Seemingly everything — including measures meant to protect patients and curtail abuse — can be up for negotiation.
Towana Looney can hardly contain her anticipation as she waits to get wheeled to an operating room at the NYU Langone Health hospital in New York City for an historic procedure. She volunteered to become the first living person in the world to get a kidney from a new kind of genetically modified pig. Scientists hope this kind of pig will someday provide an unlimited supply of kidneys, livers, hearts and other organs that could alleviate the chronic shortage of organs for transplantation and save thousands of patients every year.