Medical Debt Soars To $140B; States Without Medicaid Expansion Hit Hard

Axios: Americans' Medical Debt Reached About $140 Billion In 2020 
Americans' medical debt added up to about $140 billion last year, according to new research published Tuesday in JAMA. Americans owe debt collectors more medical debt than any other source of debt. Looking at 10% of all credit reports from credit rating agency TransUnion, researchers said they found nearly one in five Americans had medical debt in collections in June 2020. (Reed, 7/21)

The New York Times: Americans’ Medical Debts Are Bigger Than Was Known, Totaling $140 Billion
Americans owe nearly twice as much medical debt as was previously known, and the amount owed has become increasingly concentrated in states that do not participate in the Affordable Care Act’s Medicaid expansion program. ... Mr. Mahoney said he was shocked to see the widening inequality in medical debt that disparate state decisions appear to have caused. The states that have declined to expand Medicaid — particularly in the South — started out having more medical debt before Obamacare passed, and since other states have expanded Medicaid, the chasm has grown wider. In 2020, Americans living in states that did not expand Medicaid owed an average of $375 more than those in states that participated in the program, roughly a 30 percent increase from the gap that existed the year before enactment. (Kliff and Sanger-Katz, 7/20)

CNN: Prescription Drugs Are Too Expensive For Many Americans. These Companies Are Trying To Change That 
It's an experience millions of Americans have had: you go to the doctor, get a prescription, take it to the pharmacy and get hit with a staggering bill, sometimes running into hundreds of dollars even if insurance covers a part of the cost. "In the US, we're unique in letting drug companies basically set their own prices," Andrew Mulcahy, a senior policy researcher at the RAND Corporation who focuses on prescription drugs, told CNN Business. Americans spend around $1,200 a year on average for prescription drugs — more than any other country — according to the latest available OECD data. (Iyengar and Gonzalez, 7/22)

KHN: Contraception Is Free To Women, Except When It’s Not 
For Stephanie Force, finding a birth control method that she likes and can get without paying out-of-pocket has been a struggle, despite the Affordable Care Act’s promise of free contraceptives for women and adolescent girls in most health plans. The 27-year-old physician recruiter in Roanoke, Virginia, was perfectly happy with the NuvaRing, a flexible vaginal ring that women insert monthly to release hormones to prevent pregnancy. But her insurer, Anthem, stopped covering the branded product and switched her to a generic version in early 2020. Force said the new product left her with headaches and feeling irritable and short-tempered. (Andrews, 7/23)

In other pharmaceutical and biotech news —

Stat: Most Clinical Trials Failed To Meet U.S. Transparency Requirements For Recently Approved Drugs
In the latest look at clinical trial transparency, a new analysis found that only 26% of drug makers made results publicly available for all studies used to win approval for their medicines during a recent two-year period. The total rose to 67% when examining trials that were conducted in patients for indications approved by the Food and Drug Administration. But just 58% of the trials met legal requirements for registering and disclosing results for drugs that were approved in 2016 and 2017. And 11% of the drugs did not have any trials for which results were legally required to be reported at the time of their approval. (Silverman, 7/22)

Stat: Seres Therapeutics Ulcerative Colitis Therapy Falls Short In Key Trial
Seres Therapeutics’ highly anticipated clinical trial in ulcerative colitis failed to meet its primary endpoint, the company announced Thursday. Seres, which is focused on microbiome therapeutics, is also shutting down two ongoing open label and maintenance studies of the therapy. Just 10% of the people who received Seres’ treatment went into remission; about the same proportion of people in the study’s placebo arm went into remission, too. (Sheridan, 7/22)

Axios: Synthetic Biology And AI Drug Discovery Platform Absci Goes Public 
Absci — a company that uses synthetic biology and machine learning to help pharmaceutical companies rapidly identify new drugs — went public Thursday. Discovering a new drug usually takes years of trial and error and huge amounts of investment. Also, more often than not, a candidate will never make it to market. (Walsh, 7/23)

Stat: DeepMind Releases Massive Database Of 3D Protein Structures 
With the advent of cheap genetic sequencing, the world of biology has been flooded with 2D data. Now, artificial intelligence is pushing the field into three dimensions. On Thursday, Alphabet-owned AI outfit DeepMind announced it has used its highly accurate deep learning model AlphaFold2 to predict the 3D structure of 350,000 proteins — including nearly every protein expressed in the human body — from their amino acid sequences. Those predictions, reported in Nature and released to the public in the AlphaFold Protein Structure Database, are a powerful tool to unravel the molecular mechanisms of the human body and deploy them in medical innovations. (Palmer, 7/22)