Healthcare Plan News

“Honestly, I’m quite alarmed by what we see in the US now,” Novo Nordisk President and CEO Lars Fruergaard Jorgensen told CNN. “Patients who believe that they’re getting access to a safe product, and they believe they’re getting semaglutide … I know for a fact that they are not getting semaglutide, because there’s only one semaglutide, and that’s produced by Novo Nordisk, and we don’t sell that to others.” The FDA lists 10 deaths and 100 hospitalizations potentially associated with

Cuban actress Lisandra Silva filed an Instagram post about her experience with the weight loss and type 2 diabetes drug Ozempic. Translated from Spanish through DeepL.com, she posted (Emojis omitted): My experience with Ozempic You know who recommended it to me: A doctor, and I tell you that I took it once to try it, since they talked so much about it and I ended up in the hospital my blood sugar dropped so low that I had to make

PWC f/k/a Price Waterhouse Coopers projects “an 8% year-on-year medical cost trend in 2025 for the Group market and 7.5% for the Individual market. This near-record trend is driven by inflationary pressure, prescription drug spending and behavioral health utilization.” The projection is based in part on a survey of healthcare plan actuaries. The survey also finds that plan efforts to cut costs have “not led to sustainable results, largely due to three reasons: 1) a siloed and modular approach centered

Echoing PWC’s finding, WTW’s survey shows that “U.S. employers project their healthcare costs will increase by 7.7% in 2025, compared with 6.9% in 2024 and 6.5% in 2023.” According to WTW’s press release “employers are reaching beyond traditional cost-shifting strategies to improve healthcare affordability and employee health. More than half of employers (52%) plan to implement programs that will reduce total costs, and just as many (51%) intend to adopt plan design and network strategies that steer to lower-cost, higher-quality

Healthcare Plan News asked Robert Ferraro, R.Ph., Vice President of Sales at Paydhealth, LLC, for a statement on costs facing healthcare plans. He echoed the concerns of employers regarding GLP-1 drugs, added some useful color to drug costs, and identified genetic therapies as a new potential cost driver: “The surging cost of prescription drug benefits remains a primary concern for self-insured health plans. While medical benefit costs remain the biggest line item for these plans, specialty drugs are rapidly becoming

Travelers released its 2024 risk survey of small, medium, and large businesses, and healthcare-related concerns topped the list: 62% cite Cyber-risk, 59% cite medical cost inflation, 59% cite increasing employee benefits costs, and 54% cite the ability to attract and retain talent. All of these risks relate to healthcare plans, whether it be the unintended release of employees’ personal health information, the costs of medical treatment and employee benefits, or the need to offer great benefits to attract and retain

The Deloitte-NASCIO Cybersecurity Study of all 50 states and the District of Columbia found limited confidence of State Chief Information Security Officers (CISOs) in their ability to respond to AI generated security attacks. None of the CISOs were “extremely confident” that their “state’s information assets are protected from Al-enabled attacks as a threat vector”, 10% were “confident”, 43% were “somewhat confident”, 33% were “not very confident” and 8% were “not confident at all”. Meanwhile, 65% and 35% OF CISOs were

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Plan members living in New England should be made aware of an amazing new resource offered by Hannaford Supermarkets: free diet and nutrition advice from real live professionals! Plan members can connect with a registered dietician via email, schedule a consultation for an in-store meeting, get free nutrition books and recipes, view videos, attend in-store demonstrations, classes, and events, and much more. A plan member just clicks on their state, and up comes a list of resident registered dieticians for

“Chevron is overruled,” Chief Justice John Roberts wrote in In Loper Bright Enterprises v. Raimondo and Relentless, Inc. v. Department of Commerce. “Courts must exercise their independent judgment in deciding whether an agency has acted within its statutory authority.” Since issued in 1984, Chevron v. Natural Resources Defense Council became one of the most cited cases in American law, as precedent for 70 Supreme Court decisions and 17,000 decisions in the lower courts. Chevron held that courts must defer to