Morning Briefing
Summaries of health policy coverage from major news organizations
Women Fill Many Lower-Ranking Positions In Health Care Industry. Yet They're Notably Absent From Executive Offices.
The Wall Street Journal: A Lot Of Women Work In Health Care. But Not At The Top. Why Is That?
Every year for the past four years, Harvard Medical School’s three-day workshop on career advancement and leadership skills for women in health care has sold out. More than 700 women will attend next month in Boston. For women in health, the ambition is there. The numbers are not. The health-care services industry has the highest share of women working in entry-level roles, according to new data from LeanIn.Org and McKinsey& Co. (Weber, 10/15)
The Wall Street Journal: What ‘Women’s Work’ Looks Like
A half-century after women began streaming into the workforce in large numbers, they have made significant gains in some fields once the domain of men, such as law and science. But the blurring of gender lines has been uneven, and many jobs continue to be done overwhelmingly by one sex or the other. To see which occupations have experienced the most change — and the least — The Wall Street Journal analyzed nearly five decades of data from IPUMS-CPS, a project by the University of Minnesota to enable analysis of Census and Labor Department data. (Bentley and Oh, 10/14)
The Wall Street Journal: Amazon Joins Trend Of Sending Workers Away For Health Care
Employers are increasingly going the distance to control health spending, paying to send workers across the country to get medical care and bypassing local health-care providers. One of the latest is Amazon.com Inc., AMZN 0.26% which will pay travel costs for workers diagnosed with cancer who choose to see doctors at City of Hope, a Los Angeles-area health system. More than 380,000 of the Seattle-based company’s employees and families across the U.S. are eligible for the travel benefit. (Evans, 10/15)
The Wall Street Journal: Johnson & Johnson’s Legal Challenges Mount
Johnson & Johnson, JNJ -0.46% facing lawsuits from more than 100,000 plaintiffs over its product safety and marketing tactics, has taken the aggressive strategy of battling many of the cases in court. And it is losing. A lot. Juries and judges have ordered the health-products giant to pay billions of dollars in several recent trials over claims that J&J’s signature baby powder and certain drugs and medical devices injured people, and that its marketing practices fueled the opioid-addiction epidemic. (Loftus, 10/14)
Modern Healthcare: Health Care Service Corp. Bosses Rake In The Green
Growing pressure to bring down health care costs hasn't pinched pay for top brass at the nation's sixth-largest health insurer. Eight of the 10 highest-paid executives—including former leaders—at Blue Cross & Blue Shield of Illinois parent company Health Care Service Corp. got raises in 2018. So did seven of the company's nine returning outside directors. (Goldberg, 10/14)
WBUR: Everybody Needs A Health Care Proxy. Even You
A health care proxy and a guardian are not the same thing, although the distinctions are often nuanced. Anyone can appoint a person as a health care proxy agent by completing a form in the presence of two witnesses. The form takes just minutes to fill out, but it is critically important. If you are incapacitated, the health care proxy agent is empowered to make decisions you would have been able to make as a patient. (Leiter, 10/15)
