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3 things we've learned from healthcare earnings

In This Article:

Yahoo Finance Senior Health Reporter Anjalee Khemlani joins the Wealth team in breaking down the biggest themes she is seeing in the healthcare space from this earnings season, ranging from CVS Health's (CVS) earnings beat, trends in health insurance providers, rising medical costs, and the pricing on GLP-1 weight-loss drugs.

Catch Anjalee's coverage of Eli Lilly's (LLY) stock reaction to its earnings print.

Also, watch Yahoo Finance's interview with Oscar Health (OSCR) CEO Mark Bertolini from December 2024, where he characterized the healthcare system as having been "broken for some time."

To watch more expert insights and analysis on the latest market action, check out more Wealth here.

00:00 Speaker A

CVS is the latest major name in health care to report earnings this season. Joining me now, we've got three key takeaways from the health care earnings so far, with our senior health reporter, Anjali Camlani. All right, so let's break down some of these takeaways here.

00:16 Anjali Camlani

Yeah, so, uh, obviously the health care sector is very large. So we'll do a subsector takeaway. I want to focus first on the insurance sector. That's really moving in some different directions than we've seen before. Medicare advantage, which had been a big theme last year and really burdening the companies with costs, hasn't been as much of a factor this year. And so we're seeing after United Health care took a big hit because of its increased utilization. Others like CVS today, as well as Humana yesterday, have said that that is not as much of a hit. So that's good news. I mean, seniors aren't using as much healthcare as they need to. Maybe they've, you know, we've come off of that post-pandemic rush of utilization. So cost should be normalizing there. Meanwhile, the ACA marketplace has seen some exits and companies are touting this as, you know, helping to control costs. But that is bad news for consumers, of course, because the fewer options you have in the marketplace, that means the fewer options you have for being able to choose your own insurance. And that's something that we've seen other insurers, like Oscar Health, which has been a big player in the ACA marketplace, kind of take a look at and talk about the need for more competition. Meanwhile, we've seen the shift, um, a little bit away from that. So, if you want to hear what Oscar Health CEO, Mark Bertolini said in the past, take a listen.

02:19 Mark Bertolini

We believe an individual market for every American so they can buy what they need and they want in covering their health care costs is the way to go in the future. But I think that's the way we need to go, and I think that's the new version of health care for Americans versus the 80-year-old version we're living with now.

02:46 Anjali Camlani

That 80-year-old version being employer health care. So we're kind of seeing a shift into what's known as Icra. I won't bore you with the details, but there is a little bit of innovation happening in that space. So something for folks to think about when it comes to, you know, the insurance sector. Meanwhile, pharma, you know, that's a big one, and I know, you know, we talked about some of the cuts from some of those biotech firms, but really with tariffs top of mind right now for these companies, the question remains, what will that mean with trickle down? Will that increase cost of drug pricing? Will it increase costs at the hospital in fact? Those are all things that we're waiting to see, especially as medical device makers got hit the most with the existing tariffs. They're working on carve outs to see if that comes through or if they're going to have to endure that pain for the rest of the year and going into next year. Meanwhile, GLP-1 costs a little bit of a drop there, interesting after compounding was taken out of the market. Thanks to the FDA removing these drugs from the shortage list. We've seen the deal, like Novo Nordisk and CVS today, with that formulary plan. And so having CVS choose and prefer Wegovy, which is Novo Nordisk drug over Eli Lilly, is sort of setting the market up for a little bit more competition as we also wait for pill forms to come out. And no news on that on what those cost prices will be. So a lot of up and down movement as you can see. On the tariff point, I also want to remind everyone that we've seen all of these major companies, uh, contribute, or commit rather, uh, upwards of, you know, $1 billion, anywhere from $1 billion to $50 billion and $55 billion in manufacturing commitments and response to those tariffs and hopes that they might not appear.

05:02 Speaker A

All right. Well, we will wait and see if they do or don't. Of course, they're waiting for some exemptions, like some other industries have begun to see, and some are still trying to get the ear of the president for. Anjali, thanks so much.