A pharmacist's plain-English guide to compounded peptides: what BPC-157, TB-500, MOTS-c, Semax, GHK-Cu, and Sermorelin are, what they cost, and how to get a prescription.

A Minnesota home care company billed Medicaid about $7.2 million from a mailbox, prosecutors say. Here is how it worked, who paid, and who went without.

Insulin's Canadian patent changed hands for one dollar. That's not a viral quote. It's in the university's archives. And the reason they did it says a lot about what's gone sideways with drug prices since. Before Insulin Before 1922, there was no insulin to give. The University of Toronto's archives tell the story of Leonard Thompson, a 14-year-old admitted to Toronto General Hospital on December 2, 1921, with acute diabetes. By early January he was close to death. On January

Viral posts joke about a $2,500 ambulance bill. A national study put the average ground trip near $1,093. A pharmacy owner on the prices you can't see.

The prior auth was already cleared. The bottle still didn't leave the counter. A patient posted the whole play by play on X this month, and it spread fast. I'm not naming the chain. The story is the loop, not the logo. And the loop is worth understanding, because it isn't one bad day at one store. It's built into how most prescriptions get paid for. What the Patient Says Happened Step What the patient was told 1 The doctor sent the prescription 2 The pharmacy asked for an ext

If you've been buying vials online labeled "research use only," HHS just pointed to a different path. Two weeks ago I asked the FDA, which is it? Now there's an answer, and it has strings attached. Here's what the notice says, who it covers, who it leaves out, and what I'd do before spending a dollar.

The Average Plan A KFF survey found the average family health plan from an employer now costs $28,303 a year, up 5% from last year. Wages rose 3.7% over the same stretch. Your Share Workers pay $7,471 of that family premium on average. At small firms, the average worker share is $9,687, about $2,800 more than at large firms.

The head of CMS says this day care billed like it was always full. That line comes from what Fox News reported on October 20, when federal officials walked into senior day care centers across New York City. Here's what officials say happened, what the centers said back, and why I think it matters for anyone who pays a health care bill.

The patient said no twice. A pharmacist says mail order shipped a prescription anyway. That's not my story. It's one pharmacist's, posted on X earlier this month, and it has been viewed more than 735,000 times. I can't verify every detail, so I'm going to tell it the way they told it, and then tell you what I do know about how the system is built.

For almost 10 years, a farmer secretly paid strangers' prescriptions. $100 a month. His name was Hody Childress. His story was first reported in January 2023, and it's going around again this month. I'm a pharmacist, and I think it's worth telling right, with the details that were reported.

The Justice Department announced charges against 15 people in Los Angeles, including six medical professionals. The cases together involve nearly $2 billion in alleged losses. Eight people were arrested. These are charges. An indictment is an allegation, and every defendant is presumed innocent.

Everyone's watching the Elizabeth Holmes movie. 175,940 Arizonans lived it. A24's documentary You Can See Everything opened Oct. 16 to $15.6 million, according to Box Office Mojo. Variety called it the biggest documentary opening in more than 20 years. I'm a pharmacist, so the part of this story I keep thinking about isn't the founder. It's the people who walked into a drugstore and paid for a blood test.

You're bleeding in the back of an ambulance. Nobody hands you a price list. You don't shop. You don't compare. You ride, and the price shows up later. Ambulance bills are all over social media right now, so I went looking for real numbers instead of viral ones. The best long-term look I found is a data brief from the Health Care Cost Institute. It covers 2012 to 2021 and was published in 2023, so it isn't new, but it shows the trend clearly.

Want your ER bill itemized? One poster says that turned $2,900 into $8,400. It's a health care post that blew up on X this month, with more than 779,000 views. A few days later, a second post, about a $385 strep test, took off too, with more than 365,000 views. Together they've been seen more than a million times. I'm a pharmacist, and I can't verify either one. These are the posters' own accounts. But I understand exactly why so many people believed them.

Your doctor wrote 4.5 mg. Nobody manufactures 4.5 mg. If you've been prescribed low dose naltrexone, or LDN, you may have already found this out the hard way. You take the prescription to a pharmacy and get told they can't fill it. Here's why, and what we do about it.

Medicare just admitted PBMs get paid more when your drugs cost more. On Oct. 16, CMS proposed a rule that would require pharmacy benefit managers, the middlemen that run drug coverage for insurers and employers, to work for flat, itemized fees in Medicare drug plans starting in 2028. Pay tied to a drug's price or its rebate would be off the table. That's a big deal for PBMs. It should also make you wonder how they've been paid up to now.

His inhaler went from about $66 to $539.19. He couldn't pay it. Cole Schmidtknecht was 22, from Wisconsin, and had asthma his whole life. In January 2024 he went to refill the inhaler he'd used for more than a decade and was told it wasn't covered anymore. He left without it. Five days later, his family says, he had a severe asthma attack, and he died on Jan. 21, 2024. His parents are suing OptumRx, the pharmacy benefit manager owned by UnitedHealth.

She's 37. She had a heart attack two weeks ago. Now she has a letter from her insurance company to share. In a video we stitched this week, she reads from it. According to the letter she shared, Cigna wrote that "after carefully reviewing the information," it determined "the service is not medically necessary." Her reaction: "So they don't think that saving my life was medically necessary." She was remarkably calm about it. We weren't.

The FDA called these injectables too risky. Now it might let pharmacies make them anyway. You've seen them on TikTok. BPC-157, the one people call Wolverine. Little vials sold online with a "for research use only" label, so nobody has to answer for what's in them. This week, HHS sent the White House a plan that could bring BPC-157 and similar compounds into compounding pharmacies. I'm a pharmacist, and I have some thoughts.

Your plan pays one price. The pharmacy gets less. The PBM keeps the gap. That's spread pricing. Most of the people paying for it have never heard the term, and the companies doing it would like to keep it that way.