Taking his turn today at the rolling health confab for presidential candidates, Democratic Senator Joe Biden talked about part of his plan we neglected to mention in our pre-interview Biden post: Government re-insurance for catastrophic care.The idea is based on the notion that a single employee who gets very sick and needs hundreds of thousands [...]
The runner-up in the race to succeed Hank McKinnell as Pfizer CEO is retiring.Vice chairman David Shedlarz, a 31-year veteran of the drug maker, will leave the company’s HQ on 42nd Street for the last time at the end of the year. Jeff Kindler, the former McDonald’s exec who got the CEO job, praised Shedlarz [...]
Bristol-Myers Squibb has been trumpeting its push into oncology, but the company said today that it won’t file for approval of a bladder-cancer drug in its pipeline. Bristol had previously said it hoped to submit the drug, called vinflunine, to the FDA by early 2008. The reversal today was based on feedback from the FDA, [...]
Current and former WellCare officials have been unloading shares as the company’s share price climbed higher and higher, the WSJ reports. The company, which provides managed care plans for Medicare and Medicaid patients, was raided by federal agents yesterday, and its stock tumbled today.Since July, CEO Todd Farha has sold $8.8 million worth of stock, [...]
As it rocketed to success in the past few years, WellCare — raided yesterday by government agents for reasons that remain a mystery– had several things going for it. One was a well-connected board of directors, as the St. Petersburg Times noted earlier this year. According to WellCare’s Web site, the company’s board includes:Ruben Jose [...]
We sure would like to know what state and federal agents were looking for yesterday when they raided the offices of WellCare Health Plans. But the market has already decided that it can’t be good. Trading in the stock was halted yesterday on news of the raid, and when trading resumed this morning, the share [...]
Joe Biden, Democratic senator and long-shot presidential candidate, is next up at the presidential health-care forums. He’ll be talking health care with a bunch of journalists (including the WSJ’s Laura Meckler) at 11:30 a.m. Eastern. Click here to watch the video.Just this week, Biden released his health plan (online here). It calls for allowing all [...]
Analysts are worrying this morning over Lilly’s cryptic announcement that the company has suspended two small trials of its experimental drug prasugrel. The drug, which was designed to reduce the risk of blood clots, has been hotly anticipated by Wall Street and the drug industry as a potential blockbuster. The WSJ broke the story late [...]
The Health Blog just tuned in to Dennis Kucinich’s turn at the presidential health-care forums. (The forums are described in this post; watch the archived video here.) Kucinich is a liberal Democratic Congressman and a long-shot candidate calling for a pretty dramatic overhaul of the health-care system — abolishing for-profit insurance, for one thing, and [...]
After James Marchese was fired from his job as a sales rep at Cell Therapeutics in Seattle, he filed a suit against the company, accusing it of promoting its drug Trisenox for unapproved uses. The federal government joined the suit, and the company settled for $10.5 million but denied wrongdoing. Federal law puts Marchese in [...]
