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Health Care

Mission Hospital may drill more wells

Meanwhile, officials at Asheville’s Mission Hospital say they continue to “have the staff and resources” to treat all patients arriving via ambulance or through the emergency room. That’s in part because the hospital and its corporate parent, HCA Healthcare, are trucking in more than 200,000 gallons of water a day...

By Ray Gronberg

October 7, 2024

Dale Folwell responds to House Speaker Tim Moore

With just three months remaining in his term, State Treasurer Dale Folwell has let his feelings about House Speaker Tim Moore be known in the wake of Moore’s recent blast at his handling of the State Health Plan. This took two forms: A formal letter to Moore on Monday, and...

By Ray Gronberg

October 3, 2024

U.S. Senate committee holds hearing with Novo Nordisk’s CEO

After a while, Tuesday’s U.S. Senate committee hearing with Novo Nordisk’s CEO became less a roasting of Novo’s pricing of Wegovy and Ozempic and more a roasting of pharmacy benefit managers for merely existing. Members of the Senate Health, Education, Labor & Pensions didn’t really follow the lead of the...

By Ray Gronberg

September 25, 2024

Budd and Moore take on Folwell

North Carolina U.S. Sen. Ted Budd, a Republican, joined in the HELP committee’s musings about what he called “an industry with a lot of strange incentives,” but he also used Tuesday’s hearing to launch an interesting side quest. This came in the form of a letter from state House Speaker...

By Ray Gronberg

September 25, 2024

Judges rule against Duke in CON hearing case

Court of Appeals judges also waded into a certificate-of-need dispute between UNC Health and Duke Health, invalidating an administrative law judge’s decision in the matter and sending it back down for further review. The 3-0 ruling didn’t turn on the substance of the quarrel between the two health systems, but...

By Ray Gronberg

September 24, 2024

The Federal Trade Commission’s battle with pharmacy benefit managers escalates

The Federal Trade Commission’s battle with pharmacy benefit managers has escalated, with both sides taking legal action in the past week to advance their point of view. On Friday, the FTC announced that it’s initiated an administrative-court lawsuit against CVS Caremark, OptumRx and Express Scripts, the county’s three leading PBMs....

By Ray Gronberg

September 23, 2024

PBMs as fiduciaries?

Meanwhile, a large-employers trade group, the ERISA Industry Committee, on Thursday issued a position paper arguing that Congress can fix PBMs simply by changing the law to make them fiduciaries. That, it said, would clear up any questions about them profiting at the expense of their clients. The change would...

By Ray Gronberg

September 23, 2024

Sanders and Folwell

The strange-bedfellows alliance between State Treasurer Dale Folwell and Vermont independent deepened on Tuesday, with Folwell starring at the senator’s news conference on GLP-1 drug prices. The treasurer reiterated the rationale for the State Health Plan’s decision to drop coverage of GLP-1s, such as Wegovy, which are prescribed for weight...

By Ray Gronberg

September 18, 2024

House Bill 246 debate

If you had an outbreak of squabbling among the General Assembly’s Republicans on your September bingo card, place your marker now, because there’s been one. The Carolina Partnership for Reform — an advocacy group long thought to have close ties to Senate leader Phil Berger — went public on Thursday...

By Welcome

September 13, 2024

Diving into HB 246

CVS Health is the independents’ main antagonist in this fight because it operates what’s widely reckoned to be the country’s leading PBM, CVS Caremark. And while many PBMs are vertically integrated, CVS is the only one of the top six that has its own chain of retail pharmacies, the Federal...

By Welcome

September 13, 2024

Wake seeing scramble for new hospital facilities

UNC Health has asked the N.C. Department of Health and Human Services for permission to establish a new, 50-bed hospital in Wake Forest (the town in Wake County, that is, not the university in Winston-Salem). Officials with the health system applied for a certificate of need for the project on...

By Welcome

September 12, 2024

The AMA weighs in on PBMs

You can add the American Medical Association to the Federal Trade Commission, Congress and other groups voicing disquiet about the current state of the pharmacy benefits management sector. The AMA this week released an analysis of market concentration among PBMs that reiterated worries that the sector’s top heavy and vertically...

By Ray Gronberg

September 11, 2024

Berger has State Health Plan on his radar

Senate leader Phil Berger says “there probably are some things that need to be done” on the legislative side of things to get the State Health Plan’s finances back in balance. But that for now remains an issue to address “down the road,” Berger told reporters on Monday. The day’s...

By Ray Gronberg

September 10, 2024

House moves Blue Cross, credit union, PBM bills

With crossover looming just a week away, the scramble to get bills through at least one chamber of the General Assembly before the deadline well and truly began on Thursday.

By Ray Gronberg

April 27, 2023

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