Health

NBC News - The Centers for Medicare and Medicaid Services announced lower prices on 15 costly prescription drugs under Medicare that include Ozempic and Wegovy. The price cuts come through the Medicare drug price negotiation program created under the Inflation Reduction Act, which then-President Joe Biden signed into law in 2022.

It's different from Trump's "most favored nation" drug pricing approach, which relies on executive orders and voluntary deals with drugmakers — not legislation. Trump recently announced such a deal with Novo Nordisk, the maker of Ozempic and Wegovy, to lower the price of the drugs in exchange for tariff relief.

The negotiated prices are what Medicare will pay drugmakers for the medicines, not what patients will pay out of pocket. Those discounts will save taxpayers $12 billion, according to CMS. It's expected to save Medicare enrollees $685 million in out of pocket costs in 2027.   Read the story and see the full list of reduced price drugs.

Nice News -  A small trial led by researchers out of China and the U.K. has turned up some promising news for people experiencing anxiety or depression. Half of participants with treatment-resistant severe depression saw clinical improvement after undergoing deep brain stimulation, or DBS, and more than a third experienced an almost total elimination of their symptoms.
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The technique involves thin electrodes being implanted deep into the brain that transmit mild electrical pulses to correct aberrant activity. It’s been used in recent years to treat a range of conditions, including — with noted success — Parkinson’s disease.
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The study also identified a “telltale” signature of brain activity that predicted how well individual patients responded to the treatment, a breakthrough that could be used in the future to personalize treatment for those most likely to benefit, per a news release from the University of Cambridge.
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Major depressive disorder is one of the most common mental health problems worldwide, and according to Stanford Medicine, at least 10% of Americans will be affected by it at some point in their lives. Antidepressants and cognitive therapies help many patients, but there are still high rates of treatment resistance: Current methods fail for between 3 and 5 people. Learn more about how deep brain stimulation may help.​