Walgreens May Sell Boots U.K. Pharmacies To Private Equity

 Walgreens Boots Alliance may sell its Boots pharmacies in the United Kingdom to private equity firms, according to media reports in the U.K.

The Sunday Times in London said Walgreens “received a takeover approach from Bain Capital more than two months ago” and is “positioning itself as a frontrunner in a forthcoming auction for Boots after completing months of due diligence.” Walgreens was unavailable for comment Saturday night.

It’s the latest report on the future of Walgreens more than 2,000 Boots pharmacies. There has also been news Walgreens was looking at other options for the Boots drugstores, including a potential spin off into a separate company.

The reports on the U.K. business come as Walgreens is spending billions of dollars on its U.S. drugstore operations at the direction of new chief executive officer Roz Brewer. Walgreens recently invested another $5.2 billion in VillageMD to escalate the expansion of doctor-staffed clinics across the U.S. under a new “Walgreens Health” business.

Walgreens new management has been investing much more on the U.S. operation. Brewer has high hopes for the much larger U.S. business and sees the potential to help remake the healthcare experience in the U.S.

“Imagine a day when 45% of our Walgreens stores – of the 9,100 stores that happen to be within five miles of 75% of the homes across the United States – where you can walk in and see a primary care physician that’s attached to a Walgreens drugstore,” Brewer said in an interview last month during the Forbes Healthcare Summit.

Walgreens has more about 13,000 retail locations across the U.S., Europe and Latin America.

https://www.forbes.com/sites/brucejapsen/2022/01/01/reports-private-equity-firms-may-buy-uk-boots-pharmacies/

Team Canada CEO 'worried' if Beijing Games can go ahead as planned

 With just over a month until the Beijing Winter Olympics opening ceremony the CEO of the Canadian Olympic Committee (COC) said he is increasingly concerned if the Games can go ahead as planned.

“We’re worried,” COC CEO David Shoemaker told the CBC in a New Year’s eve interview. “We’re confident that these Games can still be scheduled safely.

“But we’re taking it day-by-day and wake up every morning to make sure that is how we still feel about it.”

The National Hockey League (NHL) last month said it would not send players to the men’s ice hockey tournament citing the pandemic’s “profound disruption” to its schedule.

As of Saturday the NHL had postponed 90 games for COVID-19 related reasons.

Other winter sports have also experienced disruptions to events that serve as Olympic qualifiers, including alpine skiing, bobsleigh and curling.

Shoemaker said that if the COC believes athlete safety is compromised it will not hesitate to pull the plug on Beijing as it did in March 2020 when they decided not to send a team to the Tokyo Summer Olympics if they were to go ahead as scheduled.

The Tokyo Games were later delayed for one year.

“We have yet to have a conversation with the IOC (International Olympic Committee) about postponement but we’re having conversations on a very frequent basis with the participating winter sport nations and it may well come up,” said Shoemaker.

The greatest concern currently for the COC is getting athletes into the Beijing bubble without testing positive for COVID-19 and face three-to-five weeks quarantine in China.

“Medical experts agree, and the consensus point of view is that it may well be that the safest place from Omicron in February will be the Olympic bubble in Beijing,” said Shoemaker.

“The real challenge for us over the next 30 days is how do we make sure that Canadian participants can get to Beijing without contracting the virus and therefore become able to test negative to get into that scenario.”

https://nationalpost.com/pmn/health-pmn/olympics-team-canada-ceo-worried-if-beijing-games-can-go-ahead-as-planned-2

France sixth country with more than 10 million COVID infections

 

France became the sixth country in the world to report more than 10 million COVID-19 infections since the outbreak of the pandemic, according to official data published on Saturday.

French health authorities reported 219,126 new confirmed cases in a 24-hour period, the fourth day in a row that the country has recorded more than 200,000 cases.

France joined the United States, India, Brazil, Britain and Russia in having had more than 10 million cases.

Saturday's figure was the second highest after the 232,200 record on Friday when French President Emmanuel Macron warned the next few weeks would be difficult.

In his New Year's Eve address, Macron did not mention a need for more restrictive health measures than those already announced, adding that the government should refrain from further limiting individual freedoms.

But the government said earlier on Saturday that from Monday wearing masks in public spaces would be mandatory for children as young as six versus 11 before.

And some big cities, including Paris and Lyon, have re-imposed wearing of masks in the street for everyone.

The seven-day moving average of new cases in France, which smoothes out daily reporting irregularities, rose to an all-time high of 157,651 - jumping almost five-fold in a month.

The number of people hospitalised for COVID-19 has increased by 96 over 24 hours, standing at a more than seven-month peak of 18,811. But that figure is still almost half the record 33,497 reached in November 2020.

The COVID-19 death toll increased by 110 over 24 hours to 123,851, the 12th highest globally. The seven-day moving average of new daily deaths has reached 186, a high since May 14.

https://www.marketscreener.com/news/latest/France-sixth-country-with-more-than-10-million-COVID-infections--37449654/

‘Medicaid for All’ is rapidly becoming a reality in New York

 In New York, it looks like the Democrats’ dream of “Medicare for All” is rapidly becoming a reality. Or at least “Medicaid for All.”

Since COVID struck, enrollment in the government-funded health-insurance program has shot up by 1.5 million people, as The Post reported this week. And the numbers were soaring even before that: By January 2020, 6.1 million of the state’s 19.8 million residents were enrolled; now, health officials estimate 7.6 million people will be getting benefits by March. That’s nearly 40 percent of the state’s population.

Add in other state health programs, from Child Health Plus to the Essential Plan, and it comes to 8.4 million New Yorkers, or 42 percent of the population, getting aid, the Empire Center reports.

And this is supposed to be a backstop program for just the poorest New Yorkers.

Gotham enrolls an even higher share of its residents in Medicaid: more than 4 million people, or nearly half of the city’s 8.8 million people.

New York has long been a national leader, both in terms of the number of enrollees and how much it spends on them — around $75 billion last year, including federal, state and local funds. And as the Empire Center also notes, more New Yorkers above the poverty line qualify for Medicaid than those under it. Even as New York’s poverty rate declined, its Medicaid rolls grew by 1.4 million from 2010 to 2019.

Clearly, the state needs to better screen applicants. But it also needs to rethink how this program “for the poor” works. Because soon, the state won’t be able to afford anything else but this.

https://nypost.com/2021/12/27/medicaid-for-all-is-rapidly-becoming-a-reality-in-new-york/

Punishing Conservative States: Payment Cuts to Hospitals Where Federal Spending is Already Low

 

Key Takeaways

• Through Medicaid’s disproportionate share hospital (DSH) program, states are supposed to use federal funds to make payments to hospitals that provide uncompensated care to a high percentage of uninsured and low-income patients.
• The DSH program fails to equitably target public resources to safety net hospitals, ultimately failing low-income individuals and the uninsured.
• In 1992, Congress locked in a formula for calculating DSH funding to states which has—for three decades—rewarded states that had used gimmicky financing schemes to maximize DSH payments, thereby disadvantaging states that had not employed such schemes.
• States that expanded Medicaid under the Affordable Care Act have been much more likely to benefit from DSH’s perverse funding structure. In 2021, Medicaid expansion states received 171 percent more federal DSH funding per uninsured person and 66 percent more federal DSH funding per low-income individual. Federal DSH funds cover 48 percent of the uncompensated care provided by hospitals in Medicaid expansion states compared to just 17 percent in non-expansion states.
• Irrationally, the Build Back Better Act would cut federal DSH funds only to non-Medicaid expansion states. These are typically states with already low DSH payments that also collectively saved the federal government hundreds of billions of dollars from 2014 to 2021 by not expanding Medicaid.
• Medicaid financing reform is necessary to equitably distribute federal aid to where it is most needed and to incentivize states to focus on providing value instead of maximizing the federal funds they can receive. Reforming DSH, as well as other Medicaid supplemental payment programs, to better target federal funds to safety net hospitals would be a good place to begin.

Full Report:

https://paragoninstitute.org/wp-content/uploads/2021/12/Punishing-Conservative-States.pdf

https://paragoninstitute.org/report-punishing-conservative-states/

Time to Revive the Principles of Operation Warp Speed

 Experienced leaders, whether in combat, on the gridiron, or in business, may not be able to fully anticipate every possible outcome, but they learn and adapt without hesitation.

It’s a lesson lost on the Biden administration. Instead, the White House continues to implement a March 2020 approach to diminishing the COVID pandemic by focusing singularly on vaccines, recommending the use of masks even when outdoors, and, recently, banning flights from countries where the omicron variant had escaped weeks before.

Rather than anticipating and adapting to changing conditions, the White House is “leading from behind.” The two latest examples are the huge imbalance between supply and demand for rapid tests and the failure to invest in the manufacturing of promising oral therapeutics such as Pfizer’s Paxlovid prior to it receiving an emergency-use authorization from the FDA. What’s worse is that the White House call for testing appeared to be a function of  politics over science as it panicked at the prospect of damage to its approval ratings from omicron. Nevertheless, the Biden team was caught flatfooted when pharmacy shelves were empty and lines for testing in major American cities stretched around the block.

Team Biden reportedly rejected offers months ago to ramp up production of rapid tests, focusing instead on mandating vaccines. It then suggested that Americans buy the tests at the pharmacy and submit claims for reimbursement through their health insurers. Rube Goldberg would be proud. The president announced last week that the government would provide 500 million at-home tests for free starting in January, and that people could order through a new government website. However, omicron will likely have peaked before the end of January, and besides, several experts have suggested we would need at least 1 billion tests per month to fulfill the purpose of properly screening the population.   

President Biden casually dismissed a question about not anticipating the latest COVID mutation: “Nobody saw it coming. Nobody in the whole world. Who saw it coming?" And he said later: “What happened was the omicron virus spread even more rapidly than anybody thought.” Dr. Anthony Fauci said on Sunday, “We’ve obviously got to do better. I mean, I think things will improve greatly as we get into January, but that doesn’t help us today and tomorrow.” Nice candor , but no foresight and no leadership.

The Biden administration needs to adopt the spirit and principles of Operation Warp Speed. This Trump-led effort anticipated what would be needed months in advance, starting by expanding America’s industrial capacity to produce vaccines, then by procuring the equipment and raw materials necessary to manufacture them long in advance of FDA authorization. It placed advanced orders not only for the vaccines but also for temperature-controlled storage containers, vials that could withstand minus 80-degree Celsius temperatures, a billion syringes and needles, and then developed distribution plans to get millions of doses of the vaccine to over 50,000 destinations across the country as soon as it was approved using an advanced information technology system to track every dose.

The principles guiding Operation Warp Speed were simple but compelling: Never let the federal government perform tasks the private sector can perform better; engage and utilize experts from the private sector to complement talented career government officials; distribute accountability and decision rights as close to where the action is as possible; assume financial risks the private sector is unwilling to take; and, if one does not get it right the first time, learn and adapt quickly. On this last point, the first three to four weeks of vaccine administration in December 2020 and early January 2021 admittedly did not go as we had planned. We did not fully anticipate that 30% of health care workers would refuse the vaccine. That is why HHS Secretary Alex Azar and CDC Director Dr. Robert Redfield, on Jan. 12, 2021, opened up vaccinations to a much broader swath of Americans at many more vaccination sites than originally recommended. Eight days later, we were vaccinating over 1.6 million Americans per day — a pace scarcely maintained by the Biden team.

If the Biden administration is ever going to lead rather than follow, it will need to alter its federal government-centered authoritarian impulses, assume financial risks the private sector will not, de-centralize the management of the COVID response from the West Wing to the experts who know what’s happening on the ground, and become comfortable with admitting when it is wrong and adapt quickly. To wit, it needs to follow in the footsteps of Operation Warp Speed, the most successful public-private partnership since World War II.

Paul Mango was the deputy chief of staff for policy at the U.S. Department of Health and Human Services from 2019-2021, serving as Secretary Alex Azar’s formal liaison to Operation Warp Speed. His forthcoming book is “Warp Speed: Inside the Operation That Beat COVID, the Critics, and the Odds” (Republic Book Publishers, March 15, 2022).

https://www.realclearpolitics.com/articles/2021/12/29/its_time_to_revive_the_principles_of_operation_warp_speed_146956.html

USDA criticized over new, uniform 'bioengineered' label for foods

 As the U.S. Department of Agriculture (USDA) changes its labeling rules for genetically modified foods in the new year, critics say the new move adds work for consumers and creates large loopholes for suppliers.  

Starting on Saturday, foods containing “genetically engineered” (GE) ingredients or “genetically modified organisms” (GMOs) will now simply be marked as “bioengineered,” according to The Washington Post.  

A phone number or QR code on the packaging may also direct consumers to more information, a decision some argue discriminates against people without access to a cell phone or smartphone, the Post added. 

The USDA has said the change "avoids a patchwork of state labeling regulations" to provide a national standard for the labels that were once set on a state-by-state basis. But critics say the term could create confusion among consumers.

“The worst part of this law is the use of the term ‘bioengineered’ because that’s not a term most consumers are familiar with,” Gregory Jaffe, director of Center for Science in the Public Interest's biotechnology project, told the Post.

The Center for Food Safety has also criticized the rules, saying it will leave the majority of genetically modified foods unlabeled, the Post added.

Specifically, the USDA sets an exemption threshold at 5 percent of "unintended" genetically engineered ingredients. In the European Union, the standard is markedly lower at 0.9 percent. 

“Consumers are left not knowing if it’s not present or if a food company just chose not to disclose,” Peter Lurie, president of Center for Science in the Public Interest, told the Post.

The Hill has reached out to USDA for comment. 

https://thehill.com/policy/healthcare/food-safety/587883-usda-criticized-over-new-uniform-bioengineered-label-for-foods