Jon Reid

By Jon Reid Top Stories White House physician Ronny Jackson withdrew his name from consideration to lead the Department of Veterans Affairs amid allegations of prior misconduct, including crashing a government vehicle while drunk, having a “pattern” of handing out sleeping pills and wakefulness-promoting medication without triaging patient history, writing himself prescriptions and overseeing a […]

By Jon Reid Top Stories Under newly proposed changes to Medicare payment rules, the Centers for Medicare and Medicaid Services aims to increase price transparency at hospitals by compelling them to publish their standard prices online in a machine-readable form to make it easier for insurers and other organizations to analyze them. CMS is also […]

By Jon Reid Top Stories The Senate Committee on Veterans Affairs’ postponed a confirmation hearing for Dr. Ronny Jackson, President Donald Trump’s pick to head the Department of Veterans Affairs, after top Republicans and Democrats raised concerns about the White House physician’s qualifications to run the federal bureaucracy and his management of the White House […]

By Jon Reid Top Stories The Trump administration said it plans to roll back an Obama-era rule that protects transgender people from discrimination by doctors, hospitals and health insurance companies. Advocates say the change could undermine recent gains that transgender people have seen in access to medical care as insurers would be allowed to once […]

By Jon Reid Week in Review Government Health and Human Services Secretary Alex Azar was discharged after his second hospitalization for treatment of diverticulitis, an infection of pouches in the colon that can be painful. Health and Human Services spokeswoman Caitlin Oakley said in a statement Friday evening that Azar’s doctors have advised him to rest […]

By Jon Reid Top Stories Prescriptions for opioid painkillers have been going down since 2011 but fell at a faster rate last year with a decline of 10 percent, according to new data by the IQVIA Institute for Human Data Science, which studies prescription drug use and spending. The report also said the number of […]

By Jon Reid Top Stories Health insurer Cigna Corp. said its $54 billion bid for pharmacy benefit manager Express Scripts Holding Co. will be reviewed by the Justice Department, whose antitrust chief, Makan Delrahim, has taken a tough stand against so-called vertical mergers, which combine two companies that do not directly compete with each other […]

By Jon Reid Top Stories Attorney General Jeff Sessions proposed a new rule that would limit the amount of opioids that a drugmaker can produce and allow the government to more actively track where companies send their products. The proposal would modify how the Drug Enforcement Administration sets production quotas for drugmakers, forcing them to […]