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Although Netflix's One Piece just set sail into the Grand Line with Season 2 only four months ago, the Straw Hat Pirates are close to hoisting the anchor once again. Back in April, the streamer previewed a few expansions to its empire based on Eiichiro Oda 's globally popular manga, including the previously announced new anime remake , The One Piece , Season 3 of the live-action series , and, first up on the calendar, a first-of-its-kind LEGO: One Piece special. The new animated project will consist of two parts, revisiting the two seasons of the adaptation so far, with plenty of humor, heart, and a ton of bricks. All it needed was a crew to man it, and Netflix had just the team to do it.

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A recent audit of state Medicaid records revealed how pharmacy benefit managers are using complicated and sophisticated approaches for handling prescription drug claims that ultimately overcharge taxpayers, a finding that underscores controversy surrounding these crucial middlemen in the pharmaceutical supply chain.

The audit of Iowa’s state Medicaid program found that one large pharmacy benefit manager appeared to have made more than $100 million by adjusting the amount of money paid to pharmacies without passing some of the savings back to managed care plans working on behalf of the state, according to Iowa officials. The review scrutinized records from 2019 through 2021.

The overall conclusion was similar to audit results conducted in a few other states, but in this instance, the auditors identified what amounted to creative accounting maneuvers, which not only made it possible to obscure the flow of money but evade prohibitions on a controversial pricing practice that is now outlawed in Iowa and some other states.

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Novo Nordisk, maker of Ozempic and Wegovy, lists the telehealth company LifeMD on its website as a provider that offers “legitimate medicine sourcing and patient support” for people seeking GLP-1 drugs. But some former employees describe LifeMD differently, as a company that has sought to maximize the volume of prescriptions it doles out at the expense of patient safety.

Former workers told STAT that providers were pressed to expedite their work to a pace that was not clinically responsible, with two of them saying providers at times were expected to review the cases of 25 people per hour based only on electronic forms the patients filled out — the equivalent of spending about two minutes on each case.

The company also discouraged providers from asking what they felt were medically relevant questions to patients, so that they don’t “delay care,” former employees said.

Continue to STAT+ to read the full story…