It’s not a huge disclosure — not even particularly close to WellPoint’s admission last week that it will have to write off more than $200 million in holdings of Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac securities. But Humana has joined the financial-crisis-ripple club with the admission that it might lose as much as $62 million on investments as a result of Lehman Brothers‘ collapse....
Health Care Industry Archive
September 2008
A brief report in Digital HealthCare and Productivity suggests that Health 2.0 also presents risks to existing healthcare providers. In other words, the very idea that social networking, widespread dissemination of medical information and other Web-based health tools can empower individuals in the healthcare system might “open up organizations to embarrassment or possibly even legal...
Last month, reports started to circulate that Steve Case’s flagship health venture, Revolution Health, was on the block, and now those rumors are starting to take on some heft. Last week, the Washington Post reported that Revolution Health Network, the best-known part of the company, is close to merging with Everyday Health, a health-and-wellness site run by New York’s Waterfront...
As if things weren’t already bad enough for health-insurance companies like WellPoint, they now have yet another hit to absorb: Losses due to the federal takeover of Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac. Yesterday, WellPoint acknowledged in an SEC filing that it will write off its holdings of preferred shares in the two mortgage-security entities — shares that are now worthless following...
Earlier this year, Humana warned that it was having trouble estimating demand for the prescription-drug plans it manages for Medicare, but it turns out that wasn’t the last of its woes. Now the giant health plan has revealed in an SEC filing that it expects to lose 308,000 members from those plans – almost 10 percent of its total enrollment in such plans — by January....
A huge price cut by personal-genomics pioneer 23andMe may well herald the demise of the commercial personal-genomics business before it even really got started — and for much the same reason that startups such as Celera Genomics saw their genome-based information businesses crash and burn almost a decade ago. Earlier today, 23andMe slashed the price of a rough-and-ready genome analysis by...
Squeezed by inexorably rising medical costs and shrinking profits, insurers like WellPoint have tried to compensate by hiking premiums to stanch the bleeding. I’ve argued previously that this strategy amounts to hounding a shrinking customer base with higher prices, as premium hikes drive more people out of insurance plans altogether. Lo and behold, that seems to be exactly what’s...
A little over a week ago, I noted the oddness — or so it seemed to me at the time — of the Seattle firm Columbia Pacific raising $325 million to invest in “U.S.-style healthcare” in Asia. As it turns out, though, Columbia Pacific is but one recent entrant in what FierceHealthcare terms an “Asian healthcare investment stampede.” Some of the recent plays...
Somehow I managed to miss the fuss back in July when the Oregon Health Plan — the state’s medical-coverage plan for low-income residents — told cancer patient Barbara Wagner that it wouldn’t cover the expensive drug Tarceva, but that it would pay for palliative care, including “physician-assisted suicide.” (In the glare of subsequent publicity, the state...
If, like many people, you find it difficult to see a doctor without making an appointment weeks in advance and sometimes wonder why you can’t ask quick medical questions by phone, email or some other means short of turning up at the office, the startup American Well has a solution for you. Well, the solution is actually for your doctor and your insurance company, although it might...
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