AstraZeneca AZN.L on Thursday forecast 2021 revenue growth after the COVID-19 vaccine developer beat analyst's estimates for fourth-quarter product sales, as a wide range of therapies helped cushion the hit from the pandemic.
https://www.nasdaq.com/articles/astrazeneca-forecasts-2021-growth-reports-q4-sales-beat-2021-02-11
COVID-19-related scams are running rampant. There are reports of a rise in charity fraud, fake job claims, fake COVID-19 tests on the black market, supply chain fraud, price gouging, cyber scams and more. In late 2020, two Texas men were charged with trying to sell $317 million in fake N95 face masks to a foreign government. The government made a payment to the men but the payment was intercepted before it went through, according to prosecutors.
In 2019, the U.S. Small Business Administration (SBA) in charge of the Paycheck Protection Program (PPP) loans, received under 800 calls on its fraud hotline. Through August of 2020, the fraud hotline had more than 42,000 calls. Though we have yet to know the real extent of fraud among government coronavirus relief packages such as PPP and Economic Injury Disaster Loans (EIDL), experts estimate it’s at least in the tens of millions. Multiple people have already been charged with PPP-related fraud claims.
A wave of attempted fraud is also hitting state unemployment benefits programs after states have struggled to process record-high claims. In October 2020, the Arizona Department of Economic Security said that it had prevented 43,000 people from receiving unemployment benefits in order to investigate potential fraud. According to the Wall Street Journal, officials believe U.S. state losses tied to unemployment insurance fraud will be in the billions of dollars.
There’s also the increased risk of insider threats for enterprises and government agencies, says Scot Walker, managing director with Mantle Advisors global investigations and intelligence firm, San Jose, Calif. As people are furloughed or their partner loses his or her job, people can become desperate. “There is, of course, the insider risk. If I give a loan to my buddy, he helps me out and gives me 25% as a thank you because my wife is out of work. In challenging times, it’s not only criminal organizations that are threatening; people have to put food on the table,” he says.
In December 2020, a former employee of the Massachusetts Department of Labor was arrested and accused of misusing her position to submit fraudulent Pandemic Unemployment Assistant (PUA) claims for herself and her husband.
A former contract employee with California’s Employment Development Department, which administers the state’s unemployment insurance program, was charged in federal court with fraud and identity theft in connection with a scheme to steal hundreds of thousands of dollars in pandemic unemployment aid. According to the complaint, the woman conspired with her boyfriend, a prisoner at California State Prison, to submit fraudulent pandemic unemployment insurance claims for California state prisoners and out-of-state residents whose identifying information was stolen.
Indeed, with more than $300 billion given out to more than five million businesses through the PPP and a second relief package approved in the U.S. at the time of publication, a significant portion of funds is thought to be going to fraudsters, says Jon Goldberg, senior vice president and deputy director of financial intelligence at a large financial firm. “It’s a guesstimate and no one will really know the extent of it for another two years most likely, but we’ve heard that 40% of SBA-controlled PPP loans were either fraudulent or had misrepresentation or falsified information on the application,” he says.
And yet, fraud schemes within government programs are just the tip of the iceberg when it comes to fraud schemes that have spawned or increased due to the COVID-19 pandemic. “We are seeing CARES Act benefits fraud, SBA PPP and EIDL fraud, unemployment fraud, illegitimate products, supply chain fraud, and enhanced cyber threats and work-from-home vulnerabilities,” says Karl Perman, president and co-founder of risk consultancy CIP CORE, and a member of Security’s Editorial Advisory Board. “The scope and magnitude of fraud related to COVID-19 is huge.”
Much of the fraud happening related to COVID-19 right now can be broken into first-party fraud that entails a person or group applying for fake loans or lying on an application to receive bigger payouts, etc., and third-party fraud which includes stolen identities to apply for loans or benefit financially, account takeovers, synthetic ID fraud, phishing schemes, ransomware and more.
Recently, the U.S. Attorney’s Office in Baltimore reported authorities had seized two domain names posing as biotechnology companies developing COVID-19 treatments. An investigation began by Homeland Security Investigations after corporate security for Moderna Inc. located one of the fake websites and contacted authorities, according to the indictment. The site showed the name and trademarked logos for the biotechnology company and redirected visitors on the Contact Us page to a form requesting name, company/institution, title, phone, e-mail, and comments/questions. It’s unclear if any identifying information was gained or used by the threat actors before the sites were taken down by authorities.
On the enterprise side, many organizations have seen an increase in fraud related to job scams. High-profile companies have had fraudsters impersonate them in fake interview calls or emails, asking for private information to conduct background checks or to pay upfront for technology costs with reimbursement down the line — potentially damaging the company’s reputation and defrauding innocent people of money or their identities.
In addition to reports of impersonation such as the above, another risk seeing a surge is synthetic ID fraud, where a fraudster combines real biographic information with fake information to create a synthetic or fake person. An example of synthetic ID fraud, would be a bad actor using a child’s social security number along with a fake name and address to create a banking account or apply for a credit card. This type of fraud is the fastest growing type of financial crime in the U.S. right now, according to McKinsey.
Financial institutions and eCommerce merchants are also experiencing an increase in account takeovers (ATOs). ATOs — where a legitimate loan was requested or account created but a fraudster gains access to the account and removes funds — have grown by 378% since the start of COVID-19, according to Sift, a payment fraud solutions company’s Q3 2020 Digital Trust and Safety Index report.
https://www.securitymagazine.com/articles/94512-fraud-schemes-amid-covid-19
A group of state Senate Democrats — fed up with Gov. Andrew Cuomo’s handling of nursing homes during the COVID-19 pandemic — on Tuesday advanced bills that would bolster accountability and oversight of the facilities as well as of the state Health Department.
The move by the legislative body’s Health Committee to OK the bills for a full Senate vote comes amid a state nursing-home crisis that has seen nearly 15,000 residents die of the disease and both Cuomo and Health Commissioner Howard Zucker raked over the coals for trying to keep that number from the public.
Cuomo’s critics blame his administration for causing deaths by forcing nursing-home residents hospitalized with COVID-19 to be returned to the vulnerable facilities amid a hospital-bed shortage — and then for underreporting coronavirus fatalities tied to the long-term-care centers.
State Sen. Gustavo Rivera (D-Bronx), chairman of the Health Committee, accused the Democratic governor Tuesday of “stonewalling” the state legislature for months by refusing to release complete figures on the number of nursing-home residents who died from the coronavirus.
Rivera said Cuomo and state Health Commissioner Howard Zucker sat on the data — until state Attorney General Letitia James late last month issued a scathing report accusing the administration of misleading the public by undercounting the deaths by 50 percent.
“As we suspected and feared, the second floor had been stonewalling us,” Rivera said during a virtual public committee meeting on the bills, referring to the governor’s office on the second floor in the state Capitol building in Albany.
The Health Department, when reporting nursing-home deaths, had only been including the roughly 8,700 residents at the time who died in a long-term-care facility, not those who succumbed to the virus in hospitals.
Hours after the release of the attorney general’s report, Zucker started coming clean by revealing that at least 4,000 more nursing-home residents had died of COVID-19 in hospitals.
Last week, an Albany judge even ripped the Cuomo-Zucker Health Department in a ruling over its failure to provide nursing-home death totals to a government watchdog group.
One of the Senate bills under review Tuesday and sponsored by Rivera would require the Health Department to report on the deaths of all nursing-home residents, including those “who were transferred to a hospital and died in the hospital.’’
The bill, if signed into law, would apply retroactively to March 1, 2020, as the pandemic was starting in the US.
“For us to make good policy, you have to have good information … so we can prevent unnecessary deaths,” Rivera said.
Republican state lawmakers jumped on the Cuomo-bashing bandwagon.
“For the families of those who lost loved ones in nursing homes, please know that today is one more step toward accountability — but the path is far from over,” state Senate Majority Leader Rob Ortt of Lockport said.
He and other GOPers are pushing for a probe into the state’s actions by the federal Department of Justice.
“The legislature should hold bipartisan hearings, using subpoena power, and the Department of Justice should expand its efforts to look into what happened here,” said state Assembly Minority Leader Will Barclay of Syracuse.
Cuomo spokesman Gary Holmes responded in an e-mail to The Post, “We said we would release additional data once our audit was complete and ahead of the commissioner’s budget testimony. We’re doing that.”
“While the AG’s report correctly pointed to the Department’s efforts to support staffing, testing, PPE and conduct inspections, it incorrectly captured the data, so we released what had been audited by that point to set the record straight.”
https://nypost.com/2021/02/09/ny-dems-holding-cuomo-accountable-over-nursing-home-fiasco/
Dallas-based Tenet Healthcare is delaying the spinoff of Conifer, its revenue cycle subsidiary, by 12 months, the company said in its fourth-quarter earnings presentation Feb. 10.
Tenet expected to complete the spinoff of Conifer into a separate publicly traded company in the second quarter of this year.
However, the process will take another year, as COVID-19 created some delays, according to the presentation.
"It's still going to occur. In the scheme of things, it is not a big delay. It will give us an opportunity to get past COVID and be prepared to do this in a much more effective manner," said Ron Rittenmeyer, Tenet executive chair and CEO.
In 2020, Tenet worked to position Conifer for a successful spinoff by working to increase margins and hiring external talent for key roles, including its CEO, COO and chief consumer officer. Conifer's margins increased to 28.1 percent in 2020, up from 17.7 percent in 2017.
Tenet initially tried selling the business, but leaders said the offers it received for the company were underwhelming, especially given the revenue cycle company's improved performance since 2017.
One analyst asked Tenet officials during the presentation if the company would consider selling the company rather than spinning it off if it received another offer. Mr. Rittenmeyer said he would consider it.
"We're a public company. We have to consider whatever comes forward," Mr. Rittenmeyer said. "That's just the nature of the business."
Access the full webcast here.
https://www.beckershospitalreview.com/finance/tenet-delays-conifer-spinoff-by-1-year.html
Blue Cross and Blue Shield of Minnesota will extend virtual care benefits for its members through the end of 2021, the insurer said Feb. 10.
The extensions include virtual care for behavioral health services, physical, speech and occupational therapy, and medication management. The change will affect all fully insured commercial, individual and Medicare plans.
Craig Samitt, MD, president and CEO of BCBS of Minnesota, said positive feedback from clinicians and members helped spark the extension.
"We've heard first-hand from our members and healthcare provider partners that virtual care is working to help address the needs of our communities at a time when in-person care may not always be available or preferred," Dr. Samitt said in a news release.
Additionally, BCBS of Minnesota will extend its cost-sharing waiver for in-network COVID-19 treatment through June 30. The insurer will continue to cover COVID-19 testing and vaccines at no cost to members through the duration of the federal public health emergency.
COVID-19 patients with high-risk conditions like pulmonary disease, chronic kidney disease and diabetes are three times more likely to require care in an intensive care unit, according to an analysis of claims reviewed by the Blue Cross Blue Shield Association.
The analysis includes national claims data from 90,900 COVID-19 cases across 4.5 million Americans. BCBSA found the average cost per admission for high-risk COVID-19 patients was 30 percent higher than for patients without underlying chronic conditions.
The average cost of COVID-19 treatment was between $500 and $1,000 for members who didn't require hospitalization, which reflected 95 percent of patients. But for members who did need hospitalization, treatment costs were 45 times higher than in an outpatient setting, and cost for ICU care was two and a half times higher than hospitalization costs. The average costs don't reflect out-of-pocket expenses for members, as cost-sharing for COVID-19 treatment was waived during the study period.
"While most COVID-19 patients don't need to be hospitalized, the data reinforces the importance of staying vigilant about COVID-19 protections and the benefits of taking the COVID-19 vaccines," BCBSA said.
The FDA last week revised and reissued the emergency use authorization for COVID-19 convalescent plasma to limit its use to only hospitalized patients early in the course of the disease and those with a medical condition that impairs their ability to make antibodies, The Wall Street Journal reported.
The revised authorization also clarifies that patients will only be given plasma that has a high concentration of antibodies.
"The update is meant so convalescent plasma can best be used on those who will benefit," Peter Marks, MD, PhD, director of the FDA's Center for Biologics Evaluation and Research, told the Journal.
Dr. Marks said the FDA made the decision to limit the therapy's authorization after evaluating results from additional clinical trials, some of which showed benefits from convalescent plasma while others showed no benefits. Three trials involving hospitalized patients reported some benefit from the therapy, but only when given soon after the patients were admitted to the hospital, the Journal reported.
Since the FDA authorized convalescent plasma as a treatment for COVID-19 patients last August, an average of roughly 20,600 units of convalescent plasma have been distributed to hospitals around the country each week, according to data from the American Red Cross cited by the Journal.
