Weekly Reader - December 19, 2022

Welcome to Finestra’s Weekly Reader, wherein we recount intriguing, important, or infamous health care-related stories you may have missed over the past week.

• Patients Complain Some Obesity Care Startups Offer Pills, and Not Much Else. (Kaiser Health News) "Many Americans turn to the latest big idea to lose weight […] Now a wave of startups offer access to a new category of drugs coupled with intensive behavioral coaching online. But already concerns are emerging."
• Brain Implants Have Begun to Restore Functions, but Advances Are Slow. (New York Times) “But achieving full-body restoration of movement, as Elon Musk envisions with such devices, is considered far into the future, if at all.”
• Medicare Plan Finder Likely Won’t Note New $35 Cap on Out-of-Pocket Insulin Costs. (Kaiser Health News) "A big cut in prescription drug prices for some Medicare beneficiaries kicks in next year, but finding those savings isn’t easy."
• Experimental skin cancer vaccine shows promising early results. (The Washington Post) “The effort is the first to show that a cancer vaccine using messenger RNA may be effective.”
• How Optimism Can Close the Medicaid Coverage Gap. (Kaiser Health News) "More than 2 million low-income people — half of them in Florida and Texas — are uninsured because they are stuck in a coverage gap: They earn too much to qualify for Medicaid, but because of a quirk of the Affordable Care Act, they earn too little to qualify for a subsidized ACA marketplace plan."Seniors being hospitalized with COVID at rate 3 times higher than other age groups. (ABC News) “COVID-19 hospitalizations among seniors are at least three times higher than any other age group, according to data from the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention.”