Of the 15 drugs Medicare negotiated new prices for in its second round of talks, none got a bigger percentage discount than Janumet. Merck has agreed to sell the diabetes pill to Medicare drug plans for $80 for a 30-day supply starting January 1, 2027, down from a $526 list price in 2024. That’s an…

Linzess is not a specialty cancer drug or a rare-disease treatment. It’s a capsule millions of Americans with chronic constipation or irritable bowel syndrome take every day, and it’s now one of the 15 drugs Medicare has negotiated a lower price for. Starting January 1, 2027, a Medicare drug plan will pay AbbVie $136 for…

Astellas Pharma has agreed to sell Xtandi, one of the most widely used prostate cancer drugs on the market, to Medicare drug plans for $7,004 for a 30-day supply starting in January 2027. That’s down from the $13,480 the same supply cost at list price in 2024, a discount of 48 percent. The new number…

Medicare has finished bargaining over the price of 15 widely used prescription drugs, and the government now has a number to show for it. If the newly agreed-upon prices had applied during 2024, Medicare would have spent an estimated $12 billion less on those drugs, a 44 percent cut in net spending. The prices themselves…

A federal rule most people never hear about until it affects them sets a hard floor on how much warning a Medicare Advantage member gets before their plan disappears. If an insurer decides not to renew its Medicare Advantage contract for the coming year, it cannot simply drop enrollees with a short heads-up. The notice…

Prosecutors say a Pennsylvania medical-equipment company submitted at least $1.3 billion in fraudulent claims to Medicare and other insurers over five months in 2025, but the money that actually left those insurers’ accounts was a fraction of that: about $6.5 million. The gap between the number in the indictment and the number that got paid…

Every September, the same cycle repeats: financial sites, insurance blogs and social posts start publishing “2027 Medicare costs” roundups weeks before Medicare itself has said anything official about next year’s numbers. This year is no different, and it means a lot of people planning around a 2027 Medicare Advantage premium or Part D deductible right…

Mary Washington Healthcare and Humana spent most of the summer locked in a contract standoff that put tens of thousands of Medicare Advantage members in the Fredericksburg, Virginia area on notice: keep your doctors, or lose your in-network coverage on September 1. Some patients didn’t wait to find out how it ended. They canceled appointments…

The Villages Health System LLC, the doctor group that treats residents of The Villages, Florida, has agreed to pay $541.5 million to resolve claims that it submitted false diagnosis codes to inflate its Medicare Advantage payments. The deal, announced by the Justice Department on August 26, 2026, is one of the largest Medicare Advantage billing…

Medicare Advantage commercials have spent years promising enrollees hundreds of dollars a year for groceries, produce or a home utility bill. What the ads rarely mention is that the money isn’t available to everyone who signs up. It is reserved for enrollees who meet a chronic-illness definition that each insurer writes for itself, and until…