Sydney Lupkin, covers drug prices and specializes in data reporting for the Kaiser Health News enterprise team. She joined KHN from VICE News and MedPage Today. Before that, she spent several years covering health topics at ABCNews.com and digging into data at The Bay Citizen and ProPublica. Her work has also appeared in The New York Times, The Boston Globe and the Boston Herald. She is a graduate of Boston University, where she worked at the New England Center for Investigative Reporting. In 2015, she spent a week in Southeast Asia reporting on malaria as an International Center for Journalists fellow.
A KHN analysis found that 47 of the drugs cost Medicare and Medicaid almost $12 billion in 2016. The spending totals don’t include rebates, which drugmakers return to the government after paying for the drugs upfront but are not public.
The USC study, released Tuesday, analyzed the prices that 1.6 million people paid for 9.5 million prescriptions in the first half of 2013, based on data from Optum Clinformatics, an organization that sells anonymized claims data for analysis, and National Average Retail Price (NARP) data.
When it comes to managing inbound phone calls, underperformance has devastating cost implications.
KHN analysis showed that more than a dozen former drug industry employees now have jobs on Capitol Hill — often on committees that handle health care policy.
“People always thought, ‘They’re generics. They’re cheap,’” said Matt Salo, who runs the National Association of Medicaid Directors. But with drug prices going up “across the board,” generics are far from immune.
It took a median time period of 4.2 years after the drugs were approved for these safety concerns to come to light, the report by Yale School of Medicine said.
Eight pharmaceutical companies more than doubled their lobbying spending in the first three months of 2017.
Zelis CEO Amanda Eisel shares her perspective on how the company is solving the problems of a fragmented health financial system to benefit all.
Scott Gottlieb, 44, has deep ties to the pharma industry as an investor and consultant but he has also worn many hats in a career that included two previous stints at the FDA, practicing as a physician, and writer/editor roles at prestigious medical journals.
Consolidation, driven by cost-cutting, drug company mergers and outsourcing of manufacturing, has prompted hospital pharmacists and health policy experts to fear that one misstep could spell disaster for patients.
Dr. Robert Califf, who stepped down last month, offers five tips about keeping Americans safe — and making sure drugs actually work — after about a year overseeing the federal agency.
At least six members of the two Senate committees tasked with questioning or confirming Tom Price for HHS secretary hold shares in healthcare companies — such as Merck, Medtronic and Gilead — according to a Kaiser Health News analysis.
Closing cancer health equity gaps require medical breakthroughs made possible by new funding approaches.
A Kaiser Health News investigation shows that the system intended to help desperate patients is being manipulated by drugmakers to maximize profits and to protect niche markets for medicines already being taken by millions.
The bill is a grab bag for industries that spent plenty of money lobbying to make sure it happened that way.
Other than major appropriations bills, a transportation spending bill and an energy infrastructure funding bill, the 21st Century Cures Act garnered more lobbying activity than any of the more than 11,000 bills proposed in the 114th Congress.
The FDA has more than 700 job vacancies in its division that reviews new drugs, and the agency has been under fire for taking too long to approve medications.
Inpatient drug spending increased by 23.4 percent annually from 2013 to 2015, according to a new report commissioned by the American Hospital Association and the Federation of American Hospitals.