A blog covering the health/care ecosystem and people.

“The truism that no one is completely safe until everyone is safe is a truism because it happens to be true.”                  So caution Michael Osterholm, epidemiologist, professor at the University of Minnesota School of Public Health, and director of CIDRAP (the Center for Infectious Disease Research and Policy at the U-MN) and collaborating writer Mark Olshaker in their new book, The Big One. (In this post, for the sake of brevity, I’ll refer to the two authors as “O&O”). Simply put, the tagline tells us what we are about to read: a

Welcome to Part 2 of 3 in my consideration of Prescription Drug Pricing in America. You can catch up with yesterday’s Part 1 post here, and Part 2 here. The macro-context for these 3 posts are the forecasts for health care spending for the coming year. Health care cost increases forecasted for 2026 will, in significant part, be driven by prescription drug trend. This graphic from this week’s release of the Business Group on Health’s employer survey on healthcare cost growth to 2026 illustrates a key finding that’s echoed in other similar studies recently released and covered here in Health Populi.

Health care costs will increase, overall, as much as 10% in 2026, the consensus of several health benefit analysts inform us. And, “workers to bear brunt of health cost increases in 2026,” reads today’s Axios headline on the topic, weaving together several studies from the Business Group on Health, Mercer, and the  International Foundation of Employee Benefit Plans.           A kay cost-contributor cited in all of these health cost forecasts is the prescription drug line item: specialty drug prices, and specifically the costs of GLP-1 medicines and cancer therapies. One strategy gaining fast-traction on both the

Among the top 20 fastest-growing growth brands beloved by Americans between 18 and 28 years of age — that is, Gen Z consumers — we see brand-equity love for companies channeling athleisure, fashion, new-fangled financial products, and food & beverage brands. And then there’s Ozempic, which gained 10 full percentage points from Q1-2025 to Q2-2025, according to The Harris Poll’s QuestBrand research. What does it mean that a prescription drug has joined these brand-loved rankings?                   The QuestBrand research found that as of the second quarter of 2025, more than one in 3

As of August 2025, U.S. patients of all demographics and geographies face many uncertainties with respect to their care. Issues such as health plan coverage, prescription drug costs, and access to services, among other challenges, continue to re-shape patients-as-health-consumers seeking transparency, clinical choices, and trust-worthy relationships with touchpoints in their personal health ecosystems. Four just-breaking stories across the health/care ecosystem illustrate several of these uncertainties and forces in U.S. health care — some adding friction and angst in a patient’s life, others perhaps providing some relief for certain health consumers. These news items address health care costs in retirement, the

At least one-half of employers will likely raise employee cost-sharing amounts in 2026, according to the Survey on health & benefit strategies for 2026 from Mercer.                 Mercer surveyed 711 organizations for this study, fielded in April 2025, to assess employers’ views on and strategies for health benefits in 2026. There are three challenging pillars underlying employers’ 2026 approaches to workers’ benefits: How to disrupt cost growth with what Mercer coins as “bolder” strategies How to consider and address all dimensions of affordability, and, How to design and implement inclusive benefits that build workforce

By 2033, national health spending will comprise 20.3% of the U.S. GDP, based on the latest national health expenditure projections developed by researchers from the Centers for Medicare and Medicaid Services (CMS). This growth will be happening as CMS projects coverage of insured people to decline over the period.               Earlier today, I attended a media briefing hosted by Health Affairs to receive the CMS team’s top-line forecast of NHE from 2024 to 2033 discussing these findings. Fuller details on the projections will be released in the July issue of Health Affairs on 7

There are many ways to measure the dysfunction of health care in the U.S.: we can point to relatively poor incomes relative to the rest of the developed world, given how much money is allocated to health care in America. The maternal mortality rate in the U.S. is unconscionably high, akin to some middle- and lower-income nations in the world. And medical debt is a uniquely American form of financial toxicity compared with other OECD nations where the concept is, well, foreign. Even with these many failures, though, it’s important to put U.S. health care in a larger context: the

With women’s health and femtech investing in the spotlight in 2025, most of the focus has been on either women’s access to health care services (e.g., for abortion and prenatal/primary care) to start-ups focusing on fertility technology and benefits, along with growing awareness of the long-overlooked menopause market opportunity. Contraception? Not so visible. Of course, we welcomed the Opill to the over-the-counter medicines market last year with FDA approval of the switch to retail pharmacy and vending machine access.                     Now let me point you to a newfangled marketing campaign for

When it comes to health, the words “fiscal” and “physical” are morphing as peoples’ economic feelings (the “fiscal”) are shaping physical and emotional health, we find in U.S. consumer data presented by John Dick, Founder and CEO of CivicScience.                 The Consumer Technology Association convened a special session with John, who painted a portrait of the U.S. consumer at a point in time — late April 2025 — reminding us more than once during the hourlong session that, “Everything is constantly changing.” One certainty that we can be sure of, in the dismal-scientist way

As Weight Watchers prepares to initiate bankruptcy proceedings, I file the news event under “thinking the unthinkable.”                     “Thinking about the unthinkable” is what Herman Kahn, a father of scenario planning, asked us to do when he pioneered the process. In this book, for Kahn, “the unthinkable” was thermonuclear war, and the year was 1962. The book was tag-lined as “must reading for an informed public” and in it, Kahn             I’ve been drawn back to this book lately because of a more intense workflow using

The health care landscape in 2030 will feature an expanded consumer health industry that will become, “an established branch of the health ecosystem focused on promoting health, preventing, disease, treating symptoms and extending healthy longevity,” according to a report published by Deloitte in September 2024, Accelerating the future: The rise of a dynamic consumer health market. While this report hit the virtual bookshelf about six months ago, I am revisiting it on this first day of the second quarter of 2025 because of its salience in this moment of uncertainties across our professional and personal lives — particularly related to

On March 11, 2020, The World Health Organization announced that the coronavirus was deemed a pandemic. WHO Director-General Dr. Tedros Adhanom Ghebreyesus asserted, “We have called every day for countries to take urgent and aggressive action. We have rung the alarm bell loud and clear.” Five years later, Edelman has fielded a survey to determine what some 4,000 health citizens living in 4 countries (Brazil, India, the UK, and the U.S.) are thinking and feeling about life after COVID-19 — and especially where their trust lies in institutions, fellow citizens, and future public health emergencies. I listened in on a discussion

People define health across many life-flows: physical health, mental health, social health, appearance (“how I look impacts how I feel”) and, to be sure, financial well-being. In tracking this last health factor for U.S. consumers, several pollsters are painting a picture of financially-stressed Americans as President Trump tallies his first six weeks into the job. The top-line of the studies is that the percent of people in America feeling financially wobbly has increased since the fourth quarter of 2024. I’ll review these studies in this post, and discuss several potential impacts we should keep in mind for peoples’ health and

The nature of retail pharmacy is changing, with both threats and opportunities re-shaping the business itself, and the pharmacy’s role in the larger health/care ecosystem. To keep sharp on the topics, I attended Rx Market Insights: Performance Trends and Outlook for 2025, a data-rich session presented on February 18 by IQVIA and sponsored by Ascend Laboratories. The webinar was hosted by DSN (Drug Store News), appropriately so because the action-packed hour went into detail providing the current state of prescription drugs and the pharmacy in America. Doug Long, IQVIA’s VP of Industry Relations, and Scott Biggs, the company’s Director of Supplier

How will we know if the life sciences sector is advancing in 2025? This is the question asked at the start of the report, a Research Brief: 2025 Indicators of Progress for the Life Sciences Sector, from the IQVIA Institute for Human Data Science (IQVIA).               To answer that question, IQVIA identified ten indicators for this 2025 profile on the life sciences sector. I selected four key data points for this discussion which provide particularly informative insights for my advisory work right now at the intersection of health, people/consumers, and technology: Trust for/with/in life science

CES 2025: as you read the acronym and year, your brain registered an image like consumer technology and the start of a new year, or some variation of those thoughts. When you saw the title of this post with the acronym “GLP-1,” your brain might not have connected the dots between a medicine and “CE,” consumer electronics. But here we are in real-time, in real life, at the convergence of pharmaceuticals and medicines and consumer-facing technology. And keep in mind that we’re at the annual meeting of CES which is convened by the Consumer Technology Association, CTA. GLP-1s are showing

What would $5 trillion be valued around the world or on the stock market? The economy of Germany was gauged around $5 trillion in 2024. India could be the world’s 3rd largest economy by 2026 valued at $5 trillion. Nvidia could be a $5 trillion company in 2025, as could Amazon. But today we report out the latest data from the Centers for Medicare and Medicaid Services (CMS) that national health spending in America reached $4.9 trillion in 2023. The full report on national health expenditures (NHE) in the U.S. was published today in Health Affairs, which came off embargo

For health care, there are many uncertainties as we reflect, one week after the 2024 U.S. elections, on probably policy and market impacts that we can expect in 2025 and beyond. In today’s Health Populi post, I’ll reflect on the first of several certainties we-know-we-know about U.S. health citizens and key factors shaping the American health ecosystem. In this first of several posts on “What Stays True for U.S. Health Care Post #Election2024,” I’ll focus on U.S. consumer dissatisfaction with drug prices — across political party identification.          Let’s set the context with data from a recently-published

The premium for employer-sponsored health plans grew by 6-7% between 2023 and 2024, according to the report on Employer Health Benefits 2024 Annual Survey from the Kaiser Family Foundation, KFF’s 26th annual study into U.S. companies’ spending on workers’ health care.                 In 2024 the average annual health insurance premium for family coverage is $25,572, split by 75% covered by the employer (just over $19,000) and 25% borne by the employee ($6,296), shown in the first chart from the report. The nearly $26K family premium is the average across all plan types in the

Only 2 in 5 people in the U.S. strongly trust science concerning food, nutrition, or diet, we learn from the 2024 IFIC Spotlight Survey: Americans’ Trust in Food & Nutrition Science, published in October.             IFIC is the International Food Information Council, a non-profit organization with a mission of communicating science-based information about food safety, nutrition, and sustainable food systems. IFIC surveyed 1,000 U.S. adults online in July to gauge consumers’ views on food and science.             The most-trusted sources of food information are the scientists involved in researching nutrition,

In a super-divided electorate like the U.S. with about 60 days leading up to the 2024 Elections, we might assume there are no “purple” areas of agreement between the Red (Republicans) and the Blue (Democrats) thinking in PANTONE color politics. Surprisingly, there are many health policies on which Democrats and Republicans concur, as found in a series of YouGov polls conducted in May 2024.                         YouGov fielded the health policies poll in five waves online, each among roughly 1,100 U.S. adults in May 2004. This bar chart summarizes health

With 70 different clinical trials for GLP-1 drugs in process with the FDA, payers — and other stakeholders in the health care ecosystem — have the semaglutide-SENSE top of mind, based on my ongoing updating of this fast-moving market space.               For overall market context on pace-of-growth in adoption, check out this chart from a JAMA Health Forum research letter on Prescription Fills for Semaglutide Products by Payment Method, published August 2nd. The study was based on the IQVIA National Prescription Audit PayerTrak data which captures 92% of Rx’s filled at retail pharmacies in

On June 11, Rohit Chopra, the Director of the Consumer Financial Protection Bureau (CFPB) announced the agency’s vision to ban Americans’ medical debt from credit reports. He called out that, “In recent years, however, medical bills became the most common collection item on credit reports. Research from the Consumer Financial Protection Bureau in 2022 showed that medical collections tradelines appeared on 43 million credit reports, and that 58 percent of bills that were in collections and on people’s credit records were medical bills.” Chopra further explained that medical debt on a consumer credit report was quite different than other kinds

Health care costs for an “average” person covered by an employer-sponsored PPO in the U.S. rose 6.7% between 2023 and 2024, according to the 2024 Milliman Medical Index. Milliman also calculated that the largest driver of cost increase in health care, accounting for nearly one-half of medical cost increases, was pharmacy, the cost of prescription drugs, which grew 13% in the year.             The big number this year is $32,066, which is the cost of that employer-sponsored PPO for a family of 4 in 2024. I’ve curated the chart of the MMI statistic for many

Thanks to Progressive Grocer’s 91st annual report and research therein, we have fresh insights into where wellness and nutrition fit into food retailers’ — and pharmacies’ and Big Box stores’ — strategies. That priority ranks high in grocers’ plans for in-store services in 2024 and beyond.               Far above all other strategies for food retailers’ in-store services, we see that on-site butchers rank high — among 3 in 4 retailers. Why this might be the case: cost- and value-focused consumers often have questions about how to cook different (lower-priced) costs of meat, or desire

In the past year, the growth of prescription drug utilization and spending has much to do with the use of GLP-1 agonists to treat diabetes and obesity, along with immunology therapy, and lipid meds, along with specialty medicines now accounting for over half of spending — up from 49% in 2018. This update comes from The Use of Medicines in the U.S. 2024 from the IQVIA Institute for Human Data Science. The annual report details trends in health services utilization, the use of prescription drugs, patient financing of those costs, the drivers underpinning the medicines spending, and an outlook to 2028.

Among Americans 50 years of age and over, the top health-related concerns are Cost, Cost, and Cost — for medical services, for long-term and home care, and for prescription medications. Quality of care ranks lower as a concern versus the financial aspects of health care in America among people 50 years of age and older, as we learn what’s On Their Minds: Older Adults’ Top Health-Related Concerns from the University of Michigan Institute for Healthcare Policy and Innovation. AARP sponsors this study, which is published nearly every month of the year on the Michigan Medicine portal.           

Three major milestones marked March 2024 which compel us to note the growing role of patients-as-consumers — especially for self-prescribing medicines and medical devices. This wave of self-prescribed healthcare is characterized by three innovations: the Opill, GLP-1 receptor agonists, and Dexcom’s Continuous Glucose Monitoring (CGM) system that’s now available without a prescription. Together, these products reflect a shift in health care empowerment toward patients as consumers with greater autonomy over their health care when the products and services are accessible, affordable, and designed with the end-user central to the value proposition and care flows. Let’s take a look at each

On February 22, 2024, I went to a CVS Pharmacy-Inside-Target in my community to fill a prescription for benzonatate 200 mg capsules. I had caught a bad case of the flu the week before, and subsequently suffered a very long tail of a cough. That’s TMI for me to write about in the Health Populi blog, but this story has a current-events twist: the pharmacist could not electronically link with my insurance company to transact my payment. He tried a few work-flows, and ended up using a discount card which in the moment worked for us, and I paid the

Ratings of honesty and ethics in professions have fallen down in the U.S., we find the Gallup Poll’s annual assessment of rankings for occupations that touch peoples’ lives in America.                     Each year for over a decade, nurses have ranked highest in this survey, representing the most-trusted profession working in America. However, even nurses’ ethic-equity has dropped in the hearts and minds of Americans over the past four years, falling 7 percentage points from a high of 85% of citizens ranking nurses at the greatest level of honesty and ethics to

In the nation’s search for spending smarter on health care, the U.S. could save at least $13 billion a year through deploying medically-tailored meals for people enrolled in Medicare, Medicaid, and private insurance programs, according to the True Cost of Food, research published by the Tufts School of Nutrition Science and Policy collaborating with The Rockefeller Foundation.       It’s been one year since the White House convened the Conference on Hunger, Nutrition, and Health, kicking off the Biden Administration’s national strategy to improve health citizens’ access to healthy food as a matter of public health and economic security.

“What omnichannel really means: hearing the customer wherever they are and making them feel heard, valued, and understood.” That statement comes from Qualtrics’ explanation of omnichannel experience design. The very human needs of feeling one is heard, is valued, and is understood, underpin the rasion d’etre of omnichannel marketing. And these very values are those that underpin the trust between patients and providers and the large healthcare ecosystem.         It’s Telehealth Awareness Week, led by the ATA. I celebrate and support the effort; this Health Populi post explains the Association’s mantra that Telehealth is Health, and that

Statin therapy has been used for decades to lower cholesterol with the goal of reducing mortality and preventing cardiovascular problems such as heart attacks and strokes. Hims & Hers announced a new service offering for health consumers and clinicians concerned about heart health called Heart Health by Hims.               This is Hims & Hers’ first foray into cardiovascular health, working in collaboration with the American College of Cardiology (ACC). ACC clinical guidelines will inform the Hims’ provider platform for the program. “Prevention is the ideal mechanism to decrease cardiovascular events and ensure optimal heart

“Brick-and-mortar pharmacies forge meaningful connections with customers” through conversations between pharmacists and patients, “on a first-name basis.” This quote comes from Christopher Lis, managing director of global healthcare intelligence at J.D. Power who released the company’s annual 2023 U.S. Pharmacy Study today, the 15th year the research has been conducted.                           Each year, J.D. Power gauges U.S. consumers’ views on retail pharmacies in four channels: brick and mortar chain drug stores, brick and mortar mass merchandisers, brick and mortar supermarkets, and mail order. Across all four channels, the

You may not be able to get that ear-worm jingle that goes “O O O Ozempic” out of your musical mind, but I’m happy to tell you there’s a new “O” in town: the Opill. Welcome to the first OTC contraceptive for sale in the USA.                     I wrote about Perrigo’s Opill here in Health Populi in May 2023 as a “signpost on the road to retail health.” It’s official: “The U.S. Food and Drug Administration (FDA) approved Opill®, a progestin-only daily oral contraceptive, for over-the-counter (OTC) use for all ages.

In health care, one of the “gifts” inspired by the coronavirus pandemic was the industry’s fast-pivot and adoption of digital health tools — especially telehealth and more generally the so-called “digital front doors” enabling patients to access medical services and personal work-flows for their care. Two years later, Experian provides a look into The State of Patient Access: 2023.                     You may know the name Experian as one of the largest credit rating agencies for consumer finance in the U.S. You may not know that the company has a significant footprint

The ten most trusted brands in the U.S. have to do with health, well-being, and hygiene in everyday life — from convenient package delivery to financial health, mindful self-care, and taking care of our kids’ boo-boos. Welcome to this year’s portfolio of the Most Trusted Brands 2023, a special report from Morning Consult that, annually, paints a picture of what everyday life for everyday people is about.         For the second year in a row, Band-Aid® brand bandages ranked top of all brands assessed among U.S. consumers from data gathered in March-April 2023. Net trust in this study

Not all “retail health” sites are created equal, U.S. consumers seem to be saying in a new study from Wolters Kluwer Health, the company’s second Pharmacy Next: Consumer Care and Cost Trends survey. Specifically, consumers have begun to differentiate between health care delivered at a retail pharmacy versus care offered at a retail store — such as Target or Walmart (both named as sites that offer “health clinics in department stores” in the study press release). While 58% of Americans were likely to visit a local pharmacy as a “first step” when faced with a non-emergency medical situation and 79%

Reviewing the annual 2023 report from the IQVIA Institute for Human Data Science discussing The Use of Medicines in the U.S. is always a detailed, deep, and insightful dive into the state of prescription drugs. It’s a volume speaking volumes on the current picture of prescribed meds, spending and revenues, health care utilization trends, and a forecast looking out to 2027. In my read of this year’s review, I see a flashing light for U.S. health care: “Wake up, public health!” I’ve pulled out a few of the data points that speak to me about population health, prevention and early

Food is a basic need, fundamental to our lives and well-being. And for millions of people around the world, and innumerable health citizens in the U.S., food security is part of daily life in 2023. Furthermore, as the U.S. Congress faces voting on the debt ceiling, the issue of SNAP benefits for nutritional assistance (aka “food stamps”) has been identified as a negotiating line-item by certain Federal budget-cut minded folks. That’s why the Food Is Medicine Initiative, launched collaboratively between the American Heart Association and The Rockefeller Foundation, is so timely and welcome.         “The vision for

Over one in three U.S. consumers use a health app or wearable technology device to track some aspect of their health. “The public’s use of health apps and wearables has increased in recent years but digital health still has room to grow,” a new poll from Morning Consult asserts, published today.                   Among digital health tech users, most check into them at least once every day in the past month. One in four use these tech’s multiple times a day, the first pie chart illustrates. Eighteen percent of people use their digital

In the U.S., price and the cost of medicines is tied to how people feel about the pharma industry, evidenced in the Global Pharma Study 2023 from Caliber. Caliber, a reputation and corporate strategy consultancy, fielded survey research among over 17,000 health consumers including U.S. adults between 18 and 75 years of age as well as health citizens living in Brazil, China, France, Germany, Japan, and the UK.                 Caliber assessed the reputation of 16 industries, globally, finding that pharma ranked 10th among the 16, just below automotive and just above chemicals (and well

Two announcements this week add important initiatives to patients’ growing choices that speak to their consumer-sides’ sense of value and personal healthcare cost-containment: Amazon launched RxPass, a generic medicines subscription service; and, Dollar General promoted its mobile health service powered by DocGo on demand for health visits, “right outside the store.”             These two programs come from outside of the legacy health care system of so-called incumbents — hospitals, health systems, health insurance — leveraging two brand-names beloved to many consumers for convenience, price transparency, and sheer cost. First, check out Amazon Pharmacy’s RxPass. Amazon

Health is “made” where we live, work, play, pray, learn….and shop. I spend a lot of time these days in the growing health/care ecosystem where retail health is broadening to address social determinants and drivers of health – namely food, transportation, broadband access, education, environment, and financial wellness – all opportunities for self-care and health engagement. For many years, I have followed the activities of CHPA, the Consumer Healthcare Products Association, and have participated in some of their conferences. Their recent announcement of a collaboration with Dollar General speaks to the growing role of self-care for all people.    

What is a “pharmacy” these days? You might have recently walked into a brick-and-mortar retail pharmacy. Or, you might have refilled a prescription to help you manage a chronic condition, online. Or, perhaps, you asked the pharmacist staffing your favorite grocery store Rx counter to give you the latest vaccine to keep COVID-19 variants at-bay. The pharmacy is all these things, and increasingly digital-first, we learn in The Rx Report: A new day in retail pharmacy, a consumer survey from CVS Health.         CVS Health, one of the two largest pharmacies operating in the U.S. in 2021

Patients have more financial skin-in-their-healthcare-games facing high-deductibles and direct out-of-pocket costs for medical bills…including prescription drugs. I collaborated with GoodRx on a “yellow paper” discussing The Health Consumers as Payer, with implications and calls-to-action for pharma and life science companies. You can download the paper at this link.               The report is intended to be a playbook for understanding patients’ growing role as consumers and health care payers, providing insights into peoples’ home economic mindsets and how these impact a patient’s adherence to medication based on cost and perceived value. With inflation facing household

Thinking about the social determinants of prescription drugs, how people take medicines in real life in my latest post in Medecision’s Liberate Health blog.           I had one of those special lightbulb moments when listening to Mauricio Gonzalez-Arias, M.D. of NYC Health + Hospitals and Suvida Healthcare discussing medication adherence and what prevents us from taking our meds as prescribed. His discussion on social determinants’ role in shaping our relationship with prescriptions was powerful, and the jumping off point for this essay.           Medication adherence is a challenge that fiscally costs the

“Partnerships, including JVs and alliances with other healthcare organizations and with new entrants, are just one way to access new capabilities, unlock speed to market, and achieve capital, scale, and operational efficiencies” in health care transformations. “In an environment with continued competition for attractive assets and significant capital in play from institutional investors, these partnerships may also be the most accessible way for organizations to capture value in expanding healthcare services and technology value pools,” we learn in Overcoming the cost of healthcare transformation through partnerships from a team of health care folks with McKinsey & Company.