Healthcare benefits

Copayments and co-insurance fees have increased on average 34% compared with those of the pre-Affordable Care Act individual insurance market, according to the results of a new HealthPocket study released Thursday.

By ending the sale of tobacco products in its 7,600 pharmacies, CVS Caremark Corp. is redefining itself as a health-care provider in an environment in which millions of newly insured Americans will be looking for quick and convenient medical care.

A group of Catholic health and educational organizations don’t have to comply with a federal Affordable Care Act requirement to provide their employees with contraception coverage, a federal judge in New York ruled.

Expenditures in the $2.7 trillion U.S. health care system have doubled since 1980, growing to 18% of gross domestic product and leading to financial success for drugmakers, hospitals and insurers.

Statins will be recommended for almost 33 million Americans, about twice the number under previous guidelines. Heart disease is the No. 1 killer worldwide, accounting for 1 in 4 U.S. deaths.

Consumers are happier with brick-and-mortar pharmacies than with mail-order.

Health care fraud will come at employers at an alarming rate, in part because the Affordable Care Act opens insurance up to millions of people who have little or no experience buying health insurance, says fraud expert Chuck Whitlock.

Staff at Walgreens stores will direct customers who ask about the exchanges to the GoHealth Marketplace, where they can shop and compare health insurance plans, enroll and find other tools and information.

Customer satisfaction with traditional brick-and-mortar pharmacies continues to outpace satisfaction with mail-order pharmacies, according to the J.D. Power 2013 U.S. Pharmacy Study.

Pharmacy benefit management specialists say that as prices skyrocket, more and more employers will narrow pharmacies and prescriptions for their employees.

The bill passed Monday would require pharmacies to notify doctors and sometimes patients when a cheaper biosimilar drug is substituted for a brand-name medicine. It also would forbid a pharmacist from substituting the biosimilar drug if the physician says no.

Some of the cheapest drugs, he points out, can do the most damage in terms of personnel issues.

Misuse of drugs like OxyContin is driving up the cost of insurance claims, and abuse of opioids is killing more people than cocaine and heroin combined.

Previous Truven research reported that $125 billion to $175 billion in annual spending in the publicly and privately insured population could be classified as abuse and fraud of the system.

In the trial of 72 people whose depression hadn’t responded to at least two antidepressants, patients taking ketamine were twice as likely to report improvement than those on a placebo.

Children of such women were more likely to have scores in the lowest quartile for verbal ability, reading accuracy and reading comprehension than those whose mothers had sufficient iodine levels, according to the study published today.

Meanwhile, doctors are protesting new guidance for the diagnosis of some mental disorders, including autism, contained in the revised edition of the Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders.

Republicans and the drug industry have urged a repeal of the board, and Obama hasn’t yet appointed any of its members. A spokeswoman for the Pharmaceutical Research and Manufacturers of America, the industry’s Washington-based lobbying group, didn’t immediately comment on the decision.

Of the 12 cancer medications approved by the Food and Drug Administration last year, 11 cost more than $100,000 annually, the physicians said in an article in Blood, the journal of the American Society of Hematology, published online.

The epilepsy drug was also tied to a three-fold increase of autism spectrum disorder, which includes Asperger syndrome and other developmental disorders, according to research published Tuesday.