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Welcome to the latest edition of Investigative Roundup, highlighting some of the best investigative reporting on healthcare each week.

Doctor Took Ivermectin and Still Got COVID

Pierre Kory, MD, one of the most vocal proponents of ivermectin, got COVID-19 in August, despite taking the anti-parasitic medication on a weekly basis to ostensibly prevent the disease, .

Kory has since doubled down on the drug, urging that the prophylactic dose be increased to twice per week, according to the Journal Sentinel.

In a statement, Kory told the paper: "The most important event that occurred between my testimony [at Sen. Ron Johnson's (R-Wisc.) hearing on COVID-19 in December 2020] and my getting sick was the delta variant," pointing to Delta's higher viral load compared with previous variants.

Kory had called ivermectin a "miracle drug" at the December 2020 Senate hearing, the Journal Sentinel reported. "If you take it, you will not get sick," he said.

The Journal Sentinel further reported on the rise of the drug in the U.S. and its connection to conspiracy theories. According to data from IQVIA obtained by the paper, prescriptions for ivermectin jumped from less than 10,000 per week in November 2020, to about 40,000 per week by January 2021. While scripts went back down as cases diminished during the spring, they were back up to 88,000 for the week ending August 13, the latest week for which there were data.

There's been an uptick in side effects from the drug, the paper reported. According to the American Association of Poison Control Centers, 2021 has seen 1,810 cases of ivermectin poisoning in the U.S. as of Oct. 31, compared with 499 for the same period in 2019.

The Journal Sentinel noted that two large randomized controlled clinical trials -- one in the U.S. () and one in the U.K. () -- will provide a more definitive picture of the use of ivermectin in COVID-19 in the near future.

St. Jude Reserves Bursting While Families Go Broke

While St. Jude Children's Research Hospital promises that families will never receive a bill, many still face serious financial burdens, .

Even though the hospital covers treatment, travel, housing, and food, there are limits, and parents have had to quit jobs to become full-time caregivers to their sick children, leading to neglected mortgage and car payments, ProPublica found. Parents have had to exhaust their savings or retirement accounts, borrow money, or ask other charities for help while their children were treated at the hospital.

Meanwhile, the highly visible charity raised $2 billion last year, and has more than $5 billion in reserves.

Ge Bai, PhD, a professor of accounting and health policy at Johns Hopkins University in Baltimore, told ProPublica that St. Jude "should be spending the money as aggressively as they raise it, but they seem to be hoarding."

The investigation also found that only about half of the $7.3 billion St. Jude raised over the past 5 fiscal years went toward research and patient care, according to IRS filings. About 30% of the money covered the cost of St. Jude's fundraising operations, and the remaining 20% went into its reserves.

Overall, the hospital spends about $500 million per year on patient services, including medical care and other assistance, ProPublica found, noting that last year, just $40 million of funds raised were spent on food, travel, and housing.

The news organization's inquiry has led to policy changes, however. In a letter to parents, St. Jude said it would be expanding assistance to parents and other relatives during kids' treatment, including increasing travel benefits to two parents instead of one, and covering regular trips to its Memphis, Tennessee facility for siblings and other loved ones.

Hospital Price Transparency: Sloppy or Defiant?

by Crain's New York Business and Turquoise Health found that compliance with a new federal price transparency rule among New York hospitals is "haphazard at best and defiantly noncompliant at worst."

For institutions that provided some level of data, files were "difficult or impossible to navigate without tech savvy, dogged determination, and advanced data skills," the publication reported.

Working with the data that the organizations could indeed pull from hospital websites, Crain's and Turquoise Health found that patients are charged "wildly different amounts for the same few common procedures -- with variations at times exceeding $10,000."

For instance, the cash price of an MRI of the brain was $446 within the Mount Sinai Health System, compared with an average of $7,356 within the NewYork-Presbyterian system.

There was even variation within systems, they found. At Montefiore Health System, for instance, the cash price of a pelvic CT scan was $220 at the system's Nyack Hospital compared with $848 at its White Plains location, which is just a 20-minute drive away.

"Adding insurance into the mix points to seemingly arbitrary differences in rates between plans, with negotiated fees sometimes even exceeding the price a patient would pay without insurance," the article stated.

While the feds raised penalties for not complying with the new law to as high as $5,500 per day (or $2 million per year), that may not be enough of a deterrent to get hospitals that make billions of dollars each year to disclose their prices, according to the article.

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