On August 4, 2011 CMS hosted a meeting to update external stakeholders on the status of the implementation and roll-out of the national actual acquisition cost (AAC) survey, the existence of which Secretary Sebelius first revealed in a letter to
Google’s $12.5B acquisition of Motorola Mobility was a jolt on what would have otherwise been a typically sleepy mid-August trading Monday. While the all-cash price tag seems hefty at first look, MMI’s balance sheet is strong with $3B in net
Since details of the Budget Control Act were made public, Hospitals have meaningfully underperformed the broader Healthcare industry; Large-Cap Pharmaceuticals, Specialty Pharmaceuticals, Biotech and Medical Devices have performed in-line This implies that the Act’s committee fails to produce legislation, which
The Budget Control Act calls for $2.1T to $2.5T in cumulative deficit reduction for the period 2013 – 2021. $917B of this is in the form of ‘up-front’ cuts in discretionary spending, and has no appreciable effect on health spending
Disney, News Corp and Comcast have put their internet streaming venture Hulu on the block for sale. At first glance, the service, which boasts 28 million users enjoying exclusive on-line access to the current programming line-ups from 264 content partners,
We update and summarize our PBM bear case in light of ESRX’ bid for MHS Generic dispensing margins (est. $9.01 / Rx) should fall toward brand levels (est. $5.77 / Rx) if average wholesale price (AWP) is replaced by a
As the Internet economy has become an ever larger part of consumer transactions, the payments industry has slowly adapted to fill its needs. Today, with the Internet accounting for roughly 5% of US retail transactions, and with new technology poised
All else equal, employers ‘compete’ for employees with compensation packages of wage + benefits, the primary benefit typically being health coverage Logically, employers will seek to produce compensation packages of net wage and health coverage as efficiently as possible; and,
The success of the recent LinkedIn and Pandora offerings, the heady multiples for cloud services stocks like Open Table and Netflix, and the rumored valuations for innovators still private, like Facebook, Groupon, Zynga and Twitter, have prompted the media to
It has been just 4 years since the introduction of the iPhone. In that short time, Apple, joined in bitter competition by Google and its Android ecosystem, has laid waste to the traditional cell phone industry and with the popularity
