As a condition of Federal Trade Commission approval for its takeover of Celgene, Bristol-Myers Squibb plans to sell off Otezla, a psoriasis drug made by Celgene that generated $1.6 billion of worldwide revenue in 2018.
Why it matters: The FTC seems worried Bristol-Myers would hold too much power in the psoriasis market; it has a psoriasis drug in development and sells Orencia, which treats psoriatic arthritis. The Otezla divestiture would significantly cut the value of the Celgene deal, and sent Bristol-Myers' stock down 7%.
Health insurers will get a chance to persuade the Supreme Court that they're entitled to roughly $12 billion in payments under the Affordable Care Act. A lower court ruled against the insurers last year, but the Supreme Court said Monday that it will hear their appeal.
The big picture: The disputed payments involve the ACA's "risk corridors" program, designed to help stabilize the law's insurance markets through their infancy. Insurers say the government still owes them billions, but the Trump administration says Congress has forbidden those payments.
President Trump will sign an executive order today directing his administration to require hospitals to disclose more information about the prices patients and insurers actually pay. The order also aims to give patients more information about their out-of-pocket costs.
What's next: The prices hospitals negotiate with insurers are valuable business information, and both parties will likely fight hard to keep those prices secret.
The fight against malaria in the past couple decades has largely had a positive trajectory — since 2000, there have been 7 million lives saved and about 1 billion cases prevented — but recently there's been pockets of plateauing or increased infections in the world.
Why it matters: Malaria parasites are starting to show more resistance against insecticides and drug treatments. Combined with political instability and lack of necessary funding, the goal of eliminating malaria now requires urgent action with new tools no longer using the "one size fits all" method, a group of malaria experts tell Axios.
The Senate is working on a proposal that would allow state Medicaid programs to pay for new gene therapies over time, and tie those payments to patients' outcomes.
Why it matters: Tying payments to how well drugs work, on this scale, would be an enormous policy change. But some experts are skeptical, saying such a model would perpetuate high prices.
