The pharmaceutical industry is under fire in the public eye, in Congress and in the courts. And it mostly brought this on itself — through price hikes, allegedly anticompetitive behavior and aggressive opioid marketing.
The big picture: There's a real debate to be had about the value of new, innovative, sometimes life-saving drugs. But the industry has clouded its own argument, and weakened its own political standing, through a slew of bad behavior.
Ambulnz, a startup that dispatches non-emergency ambulances, has filed paperwork with the Securities and Exchange Commission to raise $90 million in outside funding. The company did not respond to multiple attempts for comment.
The bottom line: Ambulnz is seeking a lot of cash, but it's unclear how the company operates.
The Ebola outbreak in the Democratic Republic of the Congo now has 7 hotspots and is considered to have an increased risk of spread within DRC and neighboring countries, the World Health Organization said in an update on Thursday.
What's new: WHO expects case numbers to continue rising due to the inability to reach all hotspot areas and the persistent pockets of community resistance that cause people to either not go to Ebola treatment centers or go after the infection is too advanced. 68% of deaths were of people not in an ETC, and the disease overall has had a 66% fatality rate, WHO said.
Hedge funds and short sellers are raising their bets that lawsuits against pharmaceutical companies will drive down their stock prices and maybe even put them out of business.
The intrigue: Data from S3 Partners provided exclusively to Axios shows bets against biotech and pharmaceutical companies have risen 12% since the beginning of the year to nearly $62 billion of short interest.
A bipartisan group of senators release the latest proposal to protect patients from surprise hospital bills on Thursday, only 2 days after the House Energy and Commerce Committee leaders released theirs.
The bottom line: Like most other proposals, the bill would protect patients from receiving out-of-network bills in emergencies, or when receiving scheduled care from out-of-network doctors at in-network facilities.
The Trump administration is considering requiring insurers to disclose their negotiated rates for services, which could affect insurers in the private market, the WSJ scooped yesterday.
Details: The White House also wants providers to tell patients the total cost of their care before they get the service, regardless of whether the provider is in the patients' insurance network.
The chief executives of 177 health care companies collectively made $2.6 billion in 2018 — roughly $700 million more than what the National Institutes of Health spent researching Alzheimer's disease last year, according to a new Axios analysis of financial filings.
Why it matters: The pay packages reveal the health care system's real incentives: finding ways to boost revenue and stock value by raising prices, filling more hospital beds, and selling more drugs and devices.
