Managed-care company Cigna Corp. said Monday it will buy fellow health insurer HealthSpring Inc. in a $3.8 billion deal that would boost Cigna's Medicare Advantage business. The Bloomfield, Conn., company will pay $55 per share in cash for HealthSpring, which is based in Nashville, Tenn. That represents a 37 percent premium over the stock's Friday closing price of $40.16. HealthSpring shares soared 33 percent, or $13.34, to $53.50 in premarket trading, while Cigna stock was up more than 3 percent, or $1.55, to $46.25. Cigna said the boards of directors for both companies have approved the deal, and it is expected to close in the first half of 2012.
Leflunomide offers a big window onto some worrisome trends in the pharmaceutical industry, including manufacturing problems and drug shortages that can result not just in price spikes, but in big disruptions in patient care - sometimes even deaths.It's not entirely clear why leflunomide became scarce, or who benefited from the price increases. The good news is that at least they appear to have been temporary. One clear factor in the shortage was a suspension in imports by Apotex, the U.S. arm of a Canadian maker of generics, after inspectors from the U.S. Food and Drug Administration found problems at two of its Toronto facilities in September 2009.
State employee Jan Mathews switched from Cigna to BlueCross for health insurance last year to save money on premiums. This year she plans to switch back, to avoid paying more to use The Women's Hospital at Centennial Medical Center. "They're just known for having exceptional health services for women, and my OB/GYN is there," Mathews said. TriStar Health System hopes more state employees will make the same choice. The local HCA unit, which includes The Women's Hospital and eight others, doesn't participate in BlueCross' Network S, offered to state workers and early retirees.
Doctors paid millions of dollars by Medtronic failed to identify a significant cancer risk with the company's spine surgery product in a 2009 paper about results of a large clinical trial. The surgeons left out important data and claimed there was no significant link between the product and cancer. The company and doctors had become aware of information on an additional cancer case, which pushed the concern to a critical level, at least two months before the paper was published, a Journal Sentinel/MedPage Today investigation found. Independent researchers say they had an ethical duty to report the cancer risk. The breach is the latest conflict-of-interest controversy facing Medtronic, which is under investigation by a U.S. Senate committee and the U.S. Justice Department for its marketing of the spine surgery product known as bone morphogenetic protein-2, or BMP-2.
BJC Healthcare, which operates Barnes-Jewish Hospital and a dozen others in Missouri and Illinois, owns property worth about $1.5 billion. But it pays few property taxes. The health system reported total revenue of $3.6 billion last year and operating earnings of $200 million but paid no corporate income taxes on its nonprofit operations. BJC and its foundations have investment portfolios totaling about $3 billion, with investment earnings of $372 million last year — but pay no capital gains taxes. The system also enjoys exemptions from state and local sales taxes on hundreds of millions of dollars in purchases of medical supplies and equipment.
Lost in the contract dispute between Clark County and the Service Employees International Union are real concerns that wages for the unionized nurses at University Medical Center are far below those of private hospitals. The result, the argument goes, is that private hospitals easily poach UMC's nurses by offering higher pay. That disparity in pay might now be addressed.Two weeks ago, Clark County commissioners, who are also UMC's board of trustees, accepted a report from the hospital on the income disparity. And they gave the hospital approval to increase the pay range for registered nurses.