Wednesday, November 4, 2026
A Jacksonville family physician charges a flat $135 a month, makes house calls and answers his phone. Here is why direct primary care is spreading.
HealthSpan Partners, an affiliate of the Cincinnati-based Catholic health system Bon Secours Mercy Health, agreed on 26 October to buy Surgery Partners for $23.50 a share in cash, in a deal valued at about $5.7 billion including debt. Bain Capital, which owns about 39 per cent, will roll its shares into the buyer. The deal needs a vote of disinterested shareholders and regulatory approval, and is expected to close in the first quarter of 2027.
Merck KGaA of Darmstadt, Germany, agreed on 19 October to buy Silence Therapeutics for $20.00 in cash per American depositary share, an equity value of about $1.3 billion and an enterprise value of $1.1 billion. The deal is expected to close in the first quarter of 2027 and still needs shareholder, court and regulatory approval.
DelveInsight, a market-research firm, estimates the global regenerative medicine market at about $41 billion in 2025 and projects roughly $162 billion by 2034. The FDA has spent years pursuing clinics selling unapproved stem cell products, most recently in a January 2025 warning letter to a Pompano Beach, Florida manufacturer. Dr. David Borenstein, a physician who offers regenerative treatments, says patients should ask what a product is before they book.
Labcorp said on Thursday 15 October that it will buy select assets of BioReference Health from OPKO Health for $722 million in cash at closing, plus up to $150 million tied to revenue from the 4Kscore prostate test. Labcorp expects the businesses to bring in about $250 million in revenue in the first year after closing. The deal needs regulatory approval and has no stated closing date.
Surgeons at Rome's Gemelli hospital removed the lower lobe of Pope Leo XIV's right lung on Tuesday 13 October, and a test during the operation confirmed lung adenocarcinoma, the Holy See Press Office said. The Vatican said the operation was successful with no complications. It has not said whether further treatment will follow.
UnitedHealth Group will report third-quarter results before the market opens on Tuesday 13 October, with an analyst call at 8:00 a.m. ET. TipRanks and MarketBeat put consensus at $4.12 to $4.15 a share on about $111.3 billion of revenue; the company does not issue quarterly forecasts. Nothing has been reported yet.
A Campaign for Accountability analysis comparing seventy-one private equity-owned hospitals with seventy-one closely matched peers found that PE-owned hospitals collected $669 more in operating profit per patient after acquisition. Their operating costs per patient showed no statistically significant change.
Healthleap, which scans hospital patient records daily to flag undiagnosed conditions, raised $38 million and expanded from three hospital partners to more than fifty in a year. The malnutrition detection it started with is now the model for a broader class of clinical surveillance tools.
Medicare launched its GLP-1 Bridge program in July, covering weight-loss drugs for certain enrollees at a $50 monthly copay. Meanwhile, commercial insurers have moved in the opposite direction — the number of people without coverage for Zepbound grew by 17 million in 2026. The gap between what the drugs cost and what payers will cover is widening.
Eli Lilly's new amylin combination delivered 23.3 percent weight loss in mid-stage trials, the strongest result yet against Novo Nordisk's stumbling pipeline. The obesity drug race is no longer about GLP-1s. It is about whatever comes after them.
Medical tourism to Mexico was built on procedures that finish in a day. A smaller set of centers is now selling residential stays of several weeks to patients with chronic illness, on a model that trades speed for duration and sits largely outside the conventional evidence base.
The state health department reports 693 confirmed measles cases across 38 of Pennsylvania's 67 counties, with 133 hospitalisations and two confirmed deaths. A third death reported by a county coroner on Sunday is under review. Fewer than one percent of cases were in vaccinated people.
Gaza's Health Ministry says the World Health Organization will stop supplying diesel to more than 20 hospitals and health centres from 19 September because of a funding shortfall. The WHO has not commented. Gaza's hospitals have run on generators since the power was cut in October 2023, and the generators were already running on oil changed a quarter as often as they should be.
Bangladesh has recorded more than 50,000 confirmed or suspected measles cases this year and child deaths have passed a thousand. Measles is the most contagious disease routinely encountered and one of the most completely preventable, which makes an outbreak of this size a measurement of a delivery system rather than of a virus.
Updated 2026-27 COVID vaccines from Pfizer/BioNTech, Moderna and Novavax have FDA approval and target the circulating XFG variant. Eligibility guidance has narrowed to those 65 and over and younger adults with qualifying conditions. Insurers say they intend to cover. Three different documents, and only one of them is the one a pharmacy reads.
The 340B discount programme was built so safety-net hospitals could buy drugs cheaply for their own patients. It ran through a single contract pharmacy in 1995 and through 32,528 of them by 2024. Two bills now in Congress propose opposite explanations for how that happened.
Tirzepatide came off the FDA shortage list in December 2024 and semaglutide in February 2025. Ifosfamide, a decades-old chemotherapy used in curative regimens, is three months into a shortage the FDA expects to run into autumn and European regulators into 2027. Same country, same regulator, same manufacturing base.
The FDA has approved tirzepatide to reduce major cardiovascular events in adults with type 2 diabetes. The trial behind it compared the drug not with placebo but with dulaglutide, an older GLP-1 that already had the indication — and the result was non-inferiority, with an 8 percent lower event rate.
Ifosfamide has been in critical shortage for about three months. It is a decades-old chemotherapy used in curative and salvage regimens for sarcoma and testicular cancer, and American supply ran overwhelmingly through one contract plant in Germany, which the FDA had cited in March for recurrent microbial contamination.
A survey of more than 1,800 employers puts the 2027 increase in health benefit costs at 8.2 percent, the steepest since 2003. That figure is what remains after the changes employers plan to make, and the largest of those changes is asking employees to pay more.
Hospitals across the state have agreed to stop turning ambulances away when the emergency department fills up. Diversion was never extra capacity. It was a way of moving a full department's problem onto the ambulance and the patient inside it.
A would-be maker of a scarce cancer drug may produce it only while the drug is officially in shortage. Succeed at ending the shortage and the permission ends with it, which is a rule that guarantees nobody builds durable capacity.
A hospital can substitute a drug, a surgeon and a shift. It usually cannot substitute the single-source device a procedure was built around, and nobody notices which items those are until one of them stops arriving.
The medicines that run short are almost never the expensive new ones. They are decades-old generics made on thin margins in a handful of plants, where a single inspection failure removes a meaningful share of world supply.
Assaults on hospital workers are frequent enough that security has become a standing cost, and the spending competes directly with the staffing whose absence contributes to the problem.
Dental coverage sits outside major medical for reasons that are historical rather than clinical, and the consequences arrive in emergency rooms that cannot treat teeth.
Federal rules oblige providers to offer interpretation and no payment mechanism accompanies the obligation. What fills the gap is a family member, which is where the errors start.
Imaging systems and infusion pumps are capital assets depreciated over a decade or more, running software the manufacturer stops supporting long before the hardware wears out.
Federal rules ended most balance billing for out-of-network care. Ground ambulance rides were excluded, which leaves the one service nobody selects still able to bill the difference.
Separating the property from the operation made nursing homes financeable. It also created a fixed obligation that does not move when occupancy does, and that is where the failures start.
Independent physician practices have been bought at scale by hospital systems, insurers and investment firms. Patients are largely unaware, and the ownership determines more than the medicine does.
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Hospitals brought in contract nurses to cover a crisis and have not been able to stop. The rates came down, the dependency did not, and the permanent staff who remain now work beside colleagues paid differently for the same shift.
Insurers deployed software to process approval requests faster. Providers deployed software to submit more of them. The volume rose, the staffing did not fall, and the patient is waiting roughly as long as before.
Obstetric units require staffing around the clock for a volume that cannot pay for it. Hospitals keeping the lights on elsewhere are shutting maternity first, and the distances patients travel are becoming the clinical problem.
Every payer wants care delivered at home because it is cheaper. The workforce that would deliver it is the least stable in the industry, and the two facts have not yet been reconciled.
The physician shortage in primary care is no longer a projection. The response taking shape reorganizes who does what, rather than waiting for doctors who are not coming.
Transparency rules produced enormous files that consumers never opened. Employers and their advisers did, and the negotiating conversation has changed as a result.
After a spending boom, employers are auditing what their mental health benefits actually deliver, and the results are separating clinical substance from wellness decoration.
Employers battered by health costs are reviving an old idea: putting the doctor inside the workplace, and the modern version is outperforming its ancestor.
Chain closures have moved the access problem into cities, where the affected neighborhoods have transit rather than distance working against them. The economics behind the closures are not local.
Produce prescriptions and medically tailored meals are entering mainstream insurance coverage, backed by the least surprising research finding in healthcare.
After a decade of patients arriving with watch data their doctors ignored, clinical workflows are finally being built to use it, selectively and skeptically.