Insurance companies are cutting earnings expectations following Medicaid redeterminations.

UnitedHealth Group projected its 2025 earnings per share at up to $30, about $1 below Wall Street expectations, in its October 15 earnings call. Elevance also shrunk its projected adjusted diluted earnings per share in 2024 from $37.20 in July to about $33 in its October 17 earnings call.

What’s going on? Payers are attributing the drops, in part, to the resumption of Medicaid eligibility determinations.

Prompted by the national public health emergency, states paused Medicaid eligibility determinations for about three years during the pandemic.

Eligibility checks then restarted in April 2023 in a process called the Medicaid “unwinding,” aka redeterminations. Since that point, about 25 million people were disenrolled, either because they became ineligible or—about 69% of the time—for some procedural reason, like failing to update their mailing address, according to a September KFF analysis.

Keep reading here.—CC

While the FDA’s August decision not to approve an MDMA-based treatment for post-traumatic stress disorder (PTSD) was a blow to the larger psychedelic medicine industry and its supporters, all hope is not lost.

Speaking on an October 22 panel at the HLTH conference in Las Vegas, Shereef Elnahal, the undersecretary for health at the Department of Veterans Affairs (VA), and Arizona Senator Kyrsten Sinema outlined steps the government is taking to bring psychedelic medicine into the mainstream healthcare system.

The VA has supported and funded studies for psychedelic therapies and their potential effectiveness in treating PTSD among veterans, roughly 6,000 of whom die from suicide annually. Before the FDA rejected Lykos’s MDMA treatment in August, 80 members of Congress had sent letters to President Joe Biden, FDA Commissioner Robert Califf, and other top government officials urging them to approve the therapy.

“Veterans have been telling me since day one of my job that this potential line of therapy is game-changing,” Elnahal said at HLTH.

While the FDA didn’t heed the call from Congress at the time, Lykos said in an October 18 statement that the company had reached an agreement with the agency on a path forward, which includes completing another Phase 3 clinical trial.

Keep reading here.—MA

Pfizer’s finances just got a (literal) shot in the arm.

The pharmaceutical giant reported its Q3 earnings on October 29 and has exceeded expectations, making $4.5 billion in net income, compared to a net loss of $2.4 billion in the same period last year.

Pfizer’s revenue also hit $17.7 billion in Q3, a 32% YoY growth, according to the report. This surpassed predictions, as data company Fact Sheet had expected the company to reach $14.9 billion in revenue, the Wall Street Journal reported Tuesday.

The company’s execs said the boost was driven by sales from its Covid-19 vaccine and its treatment for the disease, Paxlovid. The vaccine made $1.4 billion in revenue, and Paxlovid revenues hit $2.7 billion in Q3.

“I’m extremely pleased with our third-quarter 2024 results and our overall performance this year,” Pfizer chair and CEO Albert Bourla said on the earnings call.

Keep reading here.—CM