CVS' ambitions keep growing, but skepticism about those ambitions isn’t going away.
The big picture: Federal Judge Richard Leon signaled Tuesday that he's still concerned about the company's $69 billion merger with Aetna, but that deal is just one element of CVS' effort to push beyond the traditional role of a pharmacy.
Virtual health care is all the rage right now, especially among investors and tech companies.
Driving the news: Private equity and venture capital firms invested $10 billion into the sector in 2018, suggesting that the financial world certainly expects that the expanding sector will turn a profit.
Immigrants have been quarantined in over 30 ICE detention centers across the U.S. for mumps and a few cases of chickenpox in recent months, according to a Quartz investigation into information shared by attorneys.
Why it matters: Mumps is from a fast-spreading but relatively mild virus that sometimes causes serious complications. But the people who are quarantined also are not allowed access to their attorneys and cannot attend bond or asylum proceedings, Quartz points out.
Nonprofit charity R.I.P. Medical Debt, which buys and absolves people’s health care debt in bulk, has wiped away $700 million since its inception in 2014 — and that number should hit $1 billion later this year, co-founders Jerry Ashton and Craig Antico told me.
How it works: R.I.P. Medical Debt rose to fame in 2016 after it helped comedian John Oliver forgive $15 million of medical debt.
The drug industry has plenty of tools to fend off the new, cheaper competitors called biosimilars — from lawsuits that prevent them from launching to deals that limit their profits after they launch.
Why it matters: The drug market is increasingly composed of biologics, which are pricier than traditional small-molecule drugs. At the same time, biosimilars — which are comparable to generic biologics — are struggling to break through.
