A.M. Vitals: CVS to Pay $5 Million to Settle FTC Charges

CVS and FTC Settle: CVS Caremark will pay $5 million to settle FTC charges that the company’s Rx America unit posted prices for certain Medicare Part D prescription drugs that were far lower than the actual prices, Dow Jones Newswires reports. The mistaken rates were posted in 2007 and 2008 at CVS and Walgreen pharmacies and prompted Medicare consumers to choose Rx America without realizing how high their drug costs would be, DJN says. CVS says the incorrect prices were posted inadvertently and that the problem took place before it acquired Rx America.

Parsing Health-Care Spending: A report from the Agency for Healthcare Research and Quality finds that 1% of the non-institutionalized U.S. population accounted for almost 22% of health-care spending in 2009, while the bottom half of the population accounted for just 2.9%, NPR’s Shots blog reports. Beyond the sick population, people who spent the most tended to be elderly, female, white and on public insurance; the low-spenders were healthy, young, and more likely to be Hispanic or African-American, Shots reports.

Brazilian Orange Juice: Coca-Cola says only a “relatively small number” of consumers have contacted the company with questions about the fungicide carbendazim, which is not approved in the U.S. but has turned up in some orange juice from Coke and its competitors imported from Brazil, the WSJ reports. The FDA has said it will pull from store shelves OJ with anything more than trace elements of the fungicide. PepsiCo., which also uses some juice imported from Brazil, said it’s testing its own products but wouldn’t say whether the fungicide has been detected.

Two Hearts Jump-Started: A case study published in the Annals of Emergency Medicine describes how a man with two hearts — one his own, one from a donor — had both organs defibrillated after they developed irregular rhythms in the hospital, the Los Angeles Times’ Booster Shots blog reports. The man, who also had a pacemaker, had the second heart implanted in a relatively uncommon procedure that is done “when the original heart is too weak to work by itself or the donor heart is a different size than the patient’s original heart,” the LAT says.

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