obesity drugs
Lilly expands retatrutide compassionate use beyond one guy
Do you recall when Lizzy Lawrence wrote about the one guy who was granted compassionate use of Eli Lilly’s investigational GLP-1 drug retatrutide? Lizzy and Elaine Chen followed up to see if others have been able to get the drug under the same terms. At first, clinicians struggled to get Lilly to say whether it would give similar access to their patients. But after Lizzy and Elaine published their initial story, the company said it will allow other patients to apply for early access.
Read more for why we don’t know if the one guy to get compassionate use of retatrutide so far is President Trump — and what clinicians have gone through to try to get the same access for their patients.
research grants
Senate blocks Trump’s research grant proposal
Senate leadership on Sunday released the text of a bipartisan government funding stopgap measure that would block the White House’s proposal to give political appointees control over federal research grants.
The Trump Department of Health and Human Services proposed to let political appointees decide who gets federal research grants, and they’d be allowed to cancel grants at will. That’s a big change from the current approach, which relies on peer review and is handled by scientists and career staff.
It’s not often that Republican lawmakers buck the Trump administration. Even so, they only temporarily blocked the proposed rule. Read more.
medicaid
Health secretary calls Medicaid cuts a ‘myth’
When health secretary Robert F. Kennedy Jr. was recently heckled in Michigan about Medicaid funding cuts, he called the cuts a “myth,” Chelsea Cirruzzo reports.
The cost of Medicaid will grow 37% in the coming decade, according to the nonpartisan Congressional Budget Office, but the CBO also estimated that the tax law Republicans passed last summer will reduce federal Medicaid spending by $911 billion over that same period.
The question is whether voters care if politicians call it a cut or a reduction in spending growth. In battleground states like Michigan, state officials and Medicaid advocates are bracing for a series of changes to Medicaid that will force some people off of the program.
Read more.
infectious disease
Sex, drugs, and U.S.-Mexico travel
Eric Boodman went to San Diego to report on how a penicillin shortage and new restrictions on foreign research collaborations have complicated efforts to curb the spread of syphilis infections.
Eric spoke to researchers trying to navigate new grant rules and staff shortages at the National Institutes of Health following mass layoffs last year. He tells the story through a social worker who has earned the trust of people living in tent cities and a woman who has fallen on hard times, without a permanent place to stay, trying to cure her infection.
Read more.
Medical technology
Breakthrough devices lose pay bump
Medicare will stop paying extra for medical technology deemed “breakthrough” without proof that they’re better than what’s already available to hospitals, Katie Palmer reports.
The supplement payments are meant to get hospitals to use new technology while it’s still expensive and give companies time to prove it’s worth it.
The Trump administration is simultaneously working on a new regulation that would make it easier for companies to show the value of new technology to Medicare officials while products are still under review by the Food and Drug Administration.
Read more for how the new system is supposed to work.
nonprofit hospitals
Drugmakers get their way on 340B pilot
Starting Jan. 1, drugmakers will be allowed to pay back rebates to hospitals, instead of discounting drugs upfront as they currently do in the 340B program, Ed Silverman reports.
The new system is part of a pilot program that targets drugs subject to Medicare price negotiation in the first two years of that program.
Read more for how the 340B program has grown in recent years and the long history of court battles between hospitals and drugmakers that led up to the pilot.
