Year: 2014

Justina Pelletier, the Connecticut teenager who has spent the last year in state custody in a case that has pitted Boston’s top doctors against a family who claims their daughter is being medically mistreated, will go into foster care, a court has ruled.        

LAKE FOREST, Calif. (AP) — Saddleback megachurch founder Rick Warren is trying to bring more attention to the problems of people suffering from mental illness following his son’s suicide last spring.

By Julie Steenhuysen CHICAGO (Reuters) – A U.S. district court judge in Louisiana has temporarily barred Blue Cross and Blue Shield of Louisiana and two smaller insurers from rejecting payments from a federal program intended to help low-income HIV patients buy health insurance. The insurers named in the case are Blue Cross and Blue Shield of Louisiana, Vantage Health Plan and Louisiana Health Cooperative. They are among a small handful of insurance companies in Louisiana that sell healthcare policies under President Barack Obama’s healthcare law. Blue Cross and Blue Shield of Louisiana, the state’s largest insurer, said late last year that it would no longer accept federal Ryan White payments on behalf of individuals with human immunodeficiency virus, which causes Acquired Immune Deficiency Syndrome.

Zaheer Ali says he helped his wife because the doctor and nurse were called to an emergency.        

U.S. health insurers including Humana Inc said on Monday that the government's proposed cuts to privately run Medicare programs appear to represent a funding decline of around 4 percent, less than the possible cuts of 7 percent or deeper that analysts had been expecting. Shares of most insurers rose on Monday, with Humana leading the pack, up 9.2 percent at $112.29 on the New York Stock Exchange in early afternoon. Shares of UnitedHealth Group Inc were up 2.8 percent at $75.91 and Aetna Inc was up 2.6 percent at $72.24. The U.S. Department of Health and Human Services late on Friday released its proposal for 2015 Medicare Advantage funding.

(Reuters) – Vivus Inc’s silence on its strategy to boost sales of obesity drug Qsymia has increased doubts about whether the pill will reach its full commercial potential. Qsymia was the first diet pill to launch in the United States in more than a decade. But both doctors and patients have shown reluctance to embrace it and other diet pills, including Arena Pharmaceuticals Inc’s Belviq, because of the long history of safety concerns surrounding diet treatments. Analysts said on Tuesday that Vivus, with its limited sales force, needed a partner to ensure the drug’s success.

An experimental once-weekly medicine for type 2 diabetes developed by Eli Lilly and Co proved as effective in lowering blood sugar as Victoza from Danish drugmaker Novo Nordisk in an eagerly anticipated late stage study. The Lilly drug, dulaglutide, achieved the primary goal of the 599-patient study by demonstrating so-called non-inferiority to the highest approved dose of Victoza after 26 weeks, according to initial results released by the company on Tuesday. Lilly shares rose more than 1 percent before retreating. Dulaglutide, considered one of the more important medicines in Lilly’s pipeline of drugs in development, is awaiting U.S. and European approval decisions.

Zaheer and Indira Ali say they were left alone in the delivery room.