Doctors and patients clamor for new hepatitis drug as insurers and states gag on cost
Doctors and patients clamor for new hepatitis drug as insurers and states gag on cost
WASHINGTON — Your money or your life?
Sovaldi, a new pill for hepatitis C, cures the liver-wasting disease in 9 of 10 patients, but treatment can cost more than $90,000.
Leading medical societies recommend the drug as a first-line treatment, and patients are clamoring for it. But insurance companies and state Medicaid programs are gagging on the price. In Oregon, officials propose to limit how many low-income patients can get Sovaldi.
Yet if Sovaldi didn’t exist, insurers would still be paying in the mid-to-high five figures to treat the most common kind of hepatitis C, a new pricing survey indicates. Some of the older alternatives involve more side effects, and are less likely to provide cures.
Rare dual tornadoes slam tiny Nebraska town killing 2 people, flattening homes, farms
PILGER, Neb. — As two giant tornadoes bore down on this tiny farming town in northeast Nebraska, Trey Wisniewski heard the storm sirens, glanced out at the blackening sky and rushed with his wife into their basement.
“My wife was holding our animals, and I was holding on to my wife. We could feel the suction try to pull us out of there,” he said Tuesday.
Suddenly, their house was gone, leaving them to dodge debris that rained down upon them. And then, the storm that hit so suddenly Monday afternoon was gone, allowing them to emerge and see what was left of the 350-person farming town of Pilger.
They found that much of the community was gone and two people had died. The disaster, delivered by twin twisters rare in how forcefully they travelled side by side for an extended period, left some townsfolk doubting whether the town could rebuild, even as they marveled that the death toll hadn’t been worse.
“This is by far the worst thing I’ve ever seen as governor,” said Gov. Dave Heineman, who flew over Pilger in a helicopter Tuesday morning and then walked through the town, trailed by reporters.
Experts discover the portrait of a mystery man beneath Picasso’s ‘The Blue Room’
WASHINGTON — For Pablo Picasso, 1901 was a pivotal time to experiment and find his own unique style. At just 19 years old, he was living in Paris, painting furiously and dirt poor, so it wasn’t unusual for him to take one canvas and reuse it to paint a fresh idea.
Now scientists and art experts are revealing they’ve found a hidden painting beneath the surface of one of Picasso’s first masterpieces, “The Blue Room.” Using advances in infrared imagery, they have uncovered a hidden portrait of a bow-tied man with his face resting on his hand.
Now the question that conservators at The Phillips Collection in Washington hope to answer is simply: Who is he?
It’s a mystery that’s fueling new research about the painting created early in Picasso’s career while he was working in Paris at the start of his distinctive blue period of melancholy subjects.
Curators and conservators revealed the discovery of the portrait for the first time to The Associated Press last week.
By wire sources