Publisher Health

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Public employees in West Virginia who took the drugs lost weight and were healthier, and some are despondent that the state is canceling a program to help pay for them.Joanna Bailey, a family physician and obesity specialist, doesn’t want to tell her patients that they can’t take Wegovy, but she has gotten used to it.Around a quarter of the people she sees in her small clinic in Wyoming County would benefit from the weight-loss medications known as GLP-1s, which also include Ozempic, Zepbound and Mounjaro, she says. The drugs have helped some of them lose 15 to 20 percent of their weight. But most people in the area she serves don’t have insurance that covers the cost, and virtually no one can afford sticker prices of $1,000 to $1,400 a month.“Even my richest patients can’t afford it,” Dr. Bailey said. She then mentioned something that many doctors in West Virginia — among the poorest states in the country, with the highest prevalence of obesity, at 41 percent — say: “We’ve separated between the haves and the have-nots.”Such disparities sharpened in March when West Virginia’s Public Employees Insurance Agency, which pays most of the cost of prescription drugs for more than 75,000 teachers, municipal workers and other public employees and their families, canceled a pilot program to cover weight-loss drugs.Some private insurers help pay for medications to treat obesity, but most Medicaid programs do so only to manage diabetes, and Medicare covers Wegovy and Zepbound only when they are prescribed for heart problems.Over the past year, states have been trying, amid rising demand, to determine how far to extend coverage for public employees. Connecticut is on track to spend more than $35 million this year through a limited weight-loss coverage initiative. In January, North Carolina announced that it would stop paying for weight-loss medications after forking out $100 million for them in 2023 — 10 percent of its spending on prescription drugs.We are having trouble retrieving the article content.Please enable JavaScript in your browser settings.Thank you for your patience while we verify access. If you are in Reader mode please exit and log into your Times account, or subscribe for all of The Times.Thank you for your patience while we verify access.Already a subscriber? Log in.Want all of The Times? Subscribe.

1 hour agoGetty ImagesThe UK is at a “tipping point”, with low uptake of routine vaccinations putting children at risk of catching severe diseases, health officials say.

The New York Times and KFF Health News are looking into a dreaded “adulting” milestone: finding your own medical insurance at 26.A hard-won provision of the Affordable Care Act allows young adults to stay on their family’s insurance until age 26. But after that, those without employer-based insurance face an array of complicated choices, including whether to shop on the insurance plan exchanges, apply for Medicaid or roll the dice and go uninsured.Are you a young adult confused about navigating the exchanges used to pick plans? Have you bought a plan on an A.C.A. exchange and found that it didn’t cover care? Have you married or taken a job just to get insurance? Did you decide to go without coverage?Whatever your story, my team of reporters and I want to hear it. I’m a longtime health journalist who has worked at both The New York Times and KFF Health News, an independent news organization covering health policy.We’ll read every response to this questionnaire, and we’ll reach out to you if we’d like to learn more about your story. We won’t publish any part of your response without following up with you first, verifying your information and hearing back from you. And I won’t use your contact information for any reason other than to get in touch with you.Finding Health InsuranceRequired fields are marked with an asterisk.

Dr. Vivek Murthy is calling for a multipronged effort to reduce gun deaths, modeled on campaigns against smoking and traffic fatalities.The U.S. surgeon general, Dr. Vivek Murthy, on Tuesday declared gun violence in America a public health crisis, recommending an array of preventive measures that he compared to past campaigns against smoking and traffic safety.The step follows years of calls by health officials to view firearm deaths through the lens of health rather than politics.The National Rifle Association has vigorously opposed this framing and promoted legislation that effectively quashed federal funding for research into gun violence for a quarter-century. The N.R.A. also unsuccessfully lobbied against Dr. Murthy’s nomination as surgeon general by Barack Obama in 2014, calling him “a serious threat to the rights of gun owners.”Dr. Murthy’s 32-page advisory calls for an increase in funding for firearm violence prevention research; advises health workers to discuss firearm storage with patients during routine medical visits; and recommends safe storage laws, universal background checks, “red flag” laws and an assault weapons ban, among other measures.“I’ve long believed this is a public health issue,” he said in an interview. “This issue has been politicized, has been polarized over time. But I think when we understand that this is a public health issue, we have the opportunity to take it out of the realm of politics and put it into the realm of public health.”But public-health-based gun reform has been an uphill battle in the United States, whose political parties are lodged in a stalemate over many of the measures the report recommends, including assault weapons bans and background checks for gun buyers. Experts estimate that 400 million guns are circulating in private hands, making it nearly impossible for the government to meaningfully restrict access to them.We are having trouble retrieving the article content.Please enable JavaScript in your browser settings.Thank you for your patience while we verify access. If you are in Reader mode please exit and log into your Times account, or subscribe for all of The Times.Thank you for your patience while we verify access.Already a subscriber? Log in.Want all of The Times? Subscribe.

At first, it was hard to tell whether something was really wrong with Rover. The 10-year-old yellow Lab had always been a bit of a loafer, so when he refused to get up from the rug last February, it was not entirely out of character. But then he declined a treat.“That was when we were like, ‘We have a very sick dog on our hands,’” said Hilary O’Hollaren of Portland, Ore.Ms. O’Hollaren’s husband rushed Rover to DoveLewis Veterinary Emergency and Specialty Hospital, where doctors had grave news: The dog had a tumor on his spleen. Worse, it had ruptured, causing massive internal bleeding. Without a blood transfusion, Rover had just hours to live.The couple quickly gave their consent, and the transfusion bought enough time for further diagnostic testing. The veterinarians discovered that although Rover had an aggressive form of cancer, which would eventually recur, it had not yet metastasized. So they removed Rover’s spleen and sent him home to live out his final months with his family.“We’re just really so grateful that there was even the option of having that transfusion,” Ms. O’Hollaren said. “We’re just trying to make every day the best day ever for him.”All kinds of ailments — including injuries, infectious diseases, immune conditions and cancer — can leave a pet in desperate need of blood, and transfusion has become an increasingly routine part of veterinary care.We are having trouble retrieving the article content.Please enable JavaScript in your browser settings.Thank you for your patience while we verify access. If you are in Reader mode please exit and log into your Times account, or subscribe for all of The Times.Thank you for your patience while we verify access.Already a subscriber? Log in.Want all of The Times? Subscribe.

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NHS England has confirmed its patient data managed by blood test management organisation Synnovis was stolen in a ransomware attack on 3 June.

Rising health care prices in the U.S. are leading employers outside the health care sector to reduce their payroll and decrease their number of employees, according to a new study co-authored by Yale economist Zack Cooper.
The study, published June 24 as a working paper by the National Bureau of Economic Research (NBER), found that when health care prices increased, non-health care employers responded by reducing their payroll and cutting the jobs of middle-class workers. For the average county, a 1% increase in health care prices would reduce aggregate income in the area by approximately $8 million annually.
The study was conducted by a team of leading economists from Yale, the University of Chicago, the University of Wisconsin-Madison, Harvard University, the U.S. Internal Revenue Service (IRS), and the U.S. Department of the Treasury.
“When health care prices go up, jobs outside the health care sector go down,” said Cooper, an associate professor of health policy at the Yale School of Public Health and of economics in the Faculty of Arts and Sciences. “It’s broadly understood that employer-sponsored health insurance creates a link between health care markets and labor markets. Our research shows that middle- and lower-income workers are shouldering rising health care prices, and in many cases, it’s costing them their jobs. Bottom line: Rising health care costs are increasing economic inequality.”
To better understand how rising health care prices affect labor market outcomes, the researchers brought together insurance claims data on approximately a third of adults with employer-sponsored insurance, health insurance premium data from the U.S. Department of Labor, and IRS data from every income tax return filed in the United States between 2008 and 2017. They then used these data to trace out how an increase in health care prices — such as a $2,000 increase on a $20,000 hospital bill — flows through to health spending, insurance premiums, employer payrolls, income and unemployment in counties, and the tax revenue collected by the federal government.
“Many think that it’s insurers or employers who bear the burden of rising health care prices. We show that it’s really the workers themselves who are impacted,” said Zarek Brot-Goldberg, an assistant professor at the Harris School of Public Policy at the University of Chicago. “It’s vital to understand that rising health care prices aren’t just impacting patients. Rising prices are hurting the employment outcomes for workers who never went to the hospital.”
For the new study, the authors used hospital mergers as a vehicle to assess the effect of price increases. From 2000 to 2020, there were over 1,000 hospital mergers among the approximately 5,000 U.S. hospitals. In past work, the authors found that approximately 20% of hospital mergers should have been expected to raise prices by lessening competition, according to merger guidelines from the Department of Justice and the Federal Trade Commission. These mergers, on average, raised prices by 5%.

“We can use our analysis to estimate the effect of hospital mergers,” said Stuart Craig, an assistant professor at the University of Wisconsin-Madison Business School. “Our results show that a hospital merger that raised prices by 5% would result in $32 million in lost wages, 203 lost jobs, a $6.8 million reduction in federal tax revenue, and a death from suicide or overdose of a worker outside the health sector.”
The study also showed that because rising health care prices leads firms to let go of workers, a knock-on effect of hospital mergers is that they lead to increases in government spending on unemployment insurance and reductions in the tax revenue collected by the federal government.
“It’s vital to point out that hospital mergers raise spending by the federal government and lower tax revenue at the same time,” said Cooper. “When prices in the U.S health sector rise, it’s actually a net negative for the economy. It’s leading to fewer jobs and precipitating all the consequences we associate with workers becoming unemployed.”
Other authors of the study were Lev Klarnet from Harvard University, Ithai Lurie from U.S. Department of Treasury, and Corbin Miller from the U.S. Internal Revenue Service.