The United States doesn’t have a market-based economy for prescription drugs. It has a shame-based economy. The latest example of this “scarlet letter” approach to drug pricing came this week as insurance giant Cigna and its Express Scripts subsidiary announced that consumers with drug benefits managed by the company could …
LAGUNA WOODS, Calif. (AP) — The group of white-haired folks — some pushing walkers, others using canes — arrive right on time at the gates of Laguna Woods Village, an upscale retirement community in the picturesque hills that frame this Southern California suburb a few miles from Disneyland. There they …
On Feb. 12, Joaquín Guzmán Loera, a.k.a. El Chapo, was convicted of multiple crimes related to running the Sinaloa drug cartel, Mexico’s largest. Thirteen days before his conviction, authorities seized enough of the synthetic opioid called fentanyl for 100 million lethal doses. It was hidden in a truck carrying cucumbers through the Nogales port of legal …
When Erin Gilmer filled her insulin prescription at a Denver-area Walgreens in January, she paid $8.50. U.S. taxpayers paid another $280.51. She thinks the price of insulin is too high. “It eats at me to know that taxpayer money is being wasted,” says Gilmer, who was diagnosed with Type 1 …
The increase, which occurred between 2006 and 2014, shows a 217 percent increase, based on data from 950 hospitals in 34 states and Washington, D.C. March 7 (UPI) — Opioid abuse has fueled a national epidemic and driving older Americans to the hospital to treat their addictions, a new study says. …
(Reuters) – OxyContin maker Purdue Pharma LP is exploring filing for bankruptcy to address potentially significant liabilities from roughly 2,000 lawsuits alleging the drugmaker contributed to the deadly opioid crisis sweeping the United States, people familiar with the matter said on Monday. The potential move shows how Purdue and its …
U.S. opioid overdose deaths have quadrupled in the last two decades, and the highest rates are now seen in eight Eastern states, a new study shows. Those states are Connecticut, Illinois, Indiana, Massachusetts, Maryland, Maine, New Hampshire and Ohio. The researchers also found that the death rate from opioids has …
Elected officials have made a lot of noise about the cost of prescription drugs. Now they must demand answers from pharmaceutical companies. Twenty-five years ago, Congress hauled before it the top executives of the nation’s seven largest tobacco companies and forced them to make a number of long-overdue admissions about cigarettes — …
In 1921, the Canadian scientist and physician Frederick Banting found that a protein isolated from the pancreas of dogs could lower blood sugar in human beings. “Insulin does not belong to me, it belongs to the world,” Banting, who sold the patent rights to his discovery to the University of Toronto …
Jan. 15 (UPI) — Few medical facilities around the U.S. offer proper medication to treat opioid use disorder, even as the country continues to grapple with a growing epidemic, a study says. Only 36 percent of medical facilities offered patients addicted to opioids buprenorphine, naltrexone or methadone, the three medications approved …
The long-running federal court case seeking to hold drugmakers responsible for the nation’s opioid crisis has a new complication: How does it deal with claims covering the thousands of babies born to addicts? Attorneys representing the children and their guardians want their claims separated from the federal case in Cleveland …