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Employers are slashing coverage of weight-loss drugs as a primary method to trim bloated health benefit budgets. As businesses face rising costs, employers including Cigna Group and consulting firm PricewaterhouseCoopers eliminated coverage this year for glucagon-like peptide-1 agonists, or GLP-1s, for weight loss. PepsiCo and Starbucks will follow suit in October. (Tong, 9/2)

Medicare Advantage customers are losing confidence in their health plans. Members’ satisfaction with their private Medicare policies declined for the second year in a row, according to an August report from consumer insight company JD Power. (Tepper, 9/4)

Elevance Health will exit another Medicaid managed care program. The health insurance company’s Healthy Blue program, which it operates as a joint venture with Louisiana Blue, will sunset at the end of the year. The state will launch a special enrollment period from Oct. 15 to Nov. 16 for the more than 290,000 Healthy Blue enrollees to sign up for a new Medicaid managed care plan, the Louisiana Department of Health said in a Tuesday news release. (Tepper, 9/2)

Centene will exit the California and Oregon commercial group markets next year. The company sells commercial insurance under the Health Net brand in both states. The change will not affect Centene’s Affordable Care Act health insurance exchanges, Medicaid or Medicare lines of business, a company spokesperson said. (Tepper, 9/3)

Have a costly medical procedure coming up? Odds are, you’re going to be asked to pay ahead of time. This year, about 92% of U.S. health providers either encourage prepayment, require it or collect a payment method on file during the estimate process, according to a survey conducted by PayZen, a patient payment service provider, and the Healthcare Financial Management Association. Last year, it was 81%. (Loftus, 9/6)

³Ô¹Ï²»´òìÈ: The Market Forces Quietly Adding Thousands To Patient Bills 

After a failed round of in vitro fertilization this year, Anne Hug’s fertility doctor said she had a single polyp in her uterus that should be removed to improve the chance of pregnancy. Hug, a professor of radiology, learned that the American College of Obstetricians and Gynecologists says the procedure can be done in a doctor’s office with local numbing. Her doctor referred her to a physician at the same hospital, which is part of a large Ohio health system. That doctor’s plan was to do the procedure in a hospital operating room, with anesthesia administered by an anesthesiologist. Hug balked at the $18,000 estimate. (Rosenthal, 9/8)

After Rasonque, a pancreatic cancer drug from Revolution Medicines, won FDA approval, patients learned it can take insurance coverage weeks to catch up. (Chen, 9/8)

Adena Health has acquired Fairfield Medical Center, months after federal regulators scrutinized its previous planned merger with OhioHealth, the state’s largest health system. The Federal Trade Commission said Fairfield and OhioHealth scrapped their merger plans after an investigation concluded that a merger between the two systems would violate antitrust guidelines and negatively affect the quality and cost of care. (Wicklund, 9/4)

Lured by promises of time savings and more face-to-face interactions with patients, a growing number of doctors are using artificial intelligence-backed scribes for clinical documentation. But experts say there’s a hidden cost: the risk of medical malpractice. (Brady, 9/3)