Trending News Today: Manufacturer to Provide Transparency in Drug Price Hikes

As outrage over the high costs of prescription drugs continues, Johnson & Johnson plans to issue a report next month outlining how much the manufacturer has raised its drug costs, according to The Wall Street Journal. Johnson & Johnson officials said that the report will provide the average increase in list prices for all company drugs in the United States, as well as the averages after discounts. The report is the pharma giant’s latest effort to address outrage over rising drug costs, the Journal reported.

The start-up company Nuna collaborated with the federal government to develop a cloud-computing database of Medicaid patients and their treatments, reported The New York Times. The database cleans, extracts, and curates information from multiple disparate and outdated computer systems to create a new collection of data for approximately 74 million Medicaid patients. Some individuals are referring to the cloud database as near historic, largely due to Medicaid information residing in many state-level computing silos, the Times reported.

As Republicans work to dismantle President Barack Obama’s Affordable Care Act, the departing Health and Human Services secretary, Sylvia Matthews Burwell, sought to increase public support for the health law in a speech at the National Press Club. According to The Wall Street Journal, Burwell poked holes in the Republicans’ platform that suggests the GOP could lower costs, save money, and expand health coverage simultaneously. “As for silver bullets, they don’t exist,” Burwell said in the report. “If something sounds too good to be true, it usually is.” Burwell is scheduled to leave office January 20, 2017, the Journal reported.