Hong Kong will ban e-cigarettes and other similar smoking products to protect public health, chief executive Carrie Lim said Wednesday during her annual address, per the Associated Press.
Why it matters: Hong Kong will be the 28th territory or country that bans the import, manufacture, sale, distribution and advertisement of e-cigarettes. However, the AP writes that mainland China remains the largest producer and consumer of tobacco products, with more than half of the country’s men being regular smokers. As of 2017, there are 87 countries that have some kind of regulation on e-cigarettes, and studies show the market for cigarettes globally is declining.
Coverage through the Affordable Care Act's insurance exchanges will be slightly cheaper next year — the first time in the law's history that premiums have gone down. Premiums for a middle-of-the road policy will fall by an average of 1.5%, the Centers for Medicare & Medicaid Services said.
Yes, but: Premiums are falling this year in part because they've gone up so much in the past. Insurers largely accounted for the Trump administration's policy changes when they raised premiums this year by more than 20%, on average.
Let’s be clear up front: Everything in health policy comes with a trade-off, including “Medicare for All,” no matter how you define it. Those costs very well may be more than American voters ultimately want to accept.
But President Trump did not lay out those choices particularly well in his USA Today op-ed yesterday.
“In the weeks and months ahead, there is a lot of action — regulatory action that we are working on,” HHS Secretary Alex Azar told Axios in a Wednesday interview.
Driving the news: President Trump signed a bill yesterday to outlaw the “gag clauses” that pharmacy benefit managers (PBMs) sometimes impose on pharmacists, preventing them from telling patients when it would be cheaper to pay cash for a prescription than to use their insurance.
In USA Today, President Trump published an op-ed branding "Medicare for All" — increasingly popular among Democrats — as "Medicare for None," claiming it would mean "the end of choice for seniors over their own health care decisions" and cost taxpayers $32.6 trillion in its first 10 years.
What he's saying: "The truth is that the centrist Democratic Party is dead. The new Democrats are radical socialists who want to model America’s economy after Venezuela."
A new study pours even more cold water — and there's already been a lot of cold water here — on the idea that the Medicaid expansion has fueled the opioid epidemic.
The details: The study, from the University of Pennsylvania’s Leonard Davis Institute of Health Economics, shows that the rate of overdose deaths in Medicaid expansion states is lower, not higher, than in non-expansion states.
Juul, the dominant e-cigarette manufacturer, reached a $10 billion valuation just seven months after its first VC investment. That's four times faster than Facebook reached the $10 billion mark, according to Yahoo Finance.
Yes, but: Juul's value could take a significant hit if and when the Food and Drug Administration cracks down on flavored vaping products and/or online sales.
