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Get your daily dose of health and medicine every weekday with STAT’s free newsletter Morning Rounds. Sign up here. Good morning. Sometimes it is so hard to drink water. Let’s all try to do that today. Advertisement A new rival to CDC’s MMWR is entering the scene The CDC’s Morbidity and Mortality Weekly Report is often referred to as “the voice of the CDC,” a bedrock of public health where details of new outbreaks and emerging diseases are first reported. But as the Trump administration continues to reshape the agency’s work, two institutions are planning to create an alternative to the publication. (Former MMWR editor-in-chief Charlotte Kent, who left the agency in February, previously told STAT that administration officials were pressuring the journal to change the way it reports information.) Now, the New England Journal of Medicine and the Center for Infectious Disease Research and Policy will begin publishing “public health alerts” on an as needed basis as part of a new section of the journal NEJM Evidence. Read more from STAT’s Anil Oza on what we know so far about how the journal will work. A new review compares antidepressant side effects The type of side effects you experience when taking an antidepressant will vary depending on which one you’re taking, especially when it comes to cardiometabolic factors, according to a systematic review published yesterday in The Lancet. That variance is likely already apparent to anyone who has been through the rigamarole of testing different antidepressants to find the right one, but the review confirms that experience based on analysis of 151 randomized controlled trials and 17 FDA reports on more than 30 medications for more than a dozen mental health conditions. Advertisement For example: Drugs like maprotiline and amitriptyline were associated with weight gain in almost half the people who took them, while agomelatine was linked with weight loss in more than half. There was about a 4 killigram (almost 9 lb.) difference between average weight lost on agomelatine and gained on maprotiline. Drugs including nortriptyline, clomipramine, imipramine, and more tended to increase heart rate compared to placebo, while fluvoxamine and moclobemide reduced heart rate. As usual, there’s a caveat that all of these findings are based on short-term studies with an average length of eight weeks. There’s a major lack of long-term research on the effects that antidepressants have on people. (If this is something you’ve got professional expertise or personal experience with, I’d love to chat.) New DTC business model mixes lower insurance, discount prices Two startups are pitching a new model for employers to help their workers pay for medications at lower prices — without using insurance. Basically, by subsidizing part of the direct-to-consumer cash price for drugs like Wegovy and Zepbound, employers can pay less than they would if they covered the drugs through insurance, and their employees can get the treatments for cheaper than the full price they’d pay on their own. The emergence of these models is an outgrowth of the momentum behind direct-to-consumer drug sales, STAT’s Elaine Chen reports. Lilly and Novo, the early and dominant makers of obesity drugs, were first to sell them at cash prices lower than the list prices. Now, under pressure from President Trump to lower drug prices broadly, other drugmakers have started allowing cash-pay options for a number of primary care treatments. Read more about the details on this new DTC model and what it means for the future of drug sales. $27,000 That was the cost of a family plan on employer-provided health insurance this year, after premiums spiked by more than double the rate of inflation, according to an annual KFF survey. “There is a quiet alarm bell going off,” KFF CEO Drew Altman said in a statement. “With GLP-1s, increases in hospital prices, tariffs and other factors, we expect employer premiums to rise more sharply next year.” Read more from STAT’s Tara Bannow. Advertisement Is U.S. health care a failed experiment? As you can see from the above — and probably in your own bills at home — health care costs are surging. In a new First Opinion essay, four physicians argue that while it’s trendy to blame factors like our aging population, rising rates of chronic illness, and new drugs, those aren’t the real culprits. Instead, the authors blame the constant drive for profits, along with the massive bureaucracy and health services skewed to bring those profits in. “Our exorbitant spending doesn’t buy us better health, or better (or even more) care,” they write. “Although ideologues claimed their market-based strategies would unleash the cost-cutting power of competition, the opposite happened; health care competition has all but disappeared.” Read more on why the authors say it’s time to walk away from this experiment, and what sort of remedy they want to see. What we’re reading
