ChatGPT Doesn't Know Your Allergies, CommonSpirit Doesn't Know Profitability, and ERISA Can't Save PBMs From State Scrutiny

Hey all,

Happy Monday! I have met many buyers of prescription pharmaceuticals where they are budgeting eight or nine or even ten figures for drugs while remaining genuinely uncertain what any individual medication costs them. Ask what they pay for Jardiance, and you'll get a fascinating variety of answers—none of them quite right, many of them delivered with impressive conviction. It would be comical if it weren’t so sad and expensive. 

Enjoy the rundown!

Jacob Brody (Co-Founder & CEO, ZorroRX)

(Second Opinion) ChatGPT in Healthcare

Dr. Robin Berzin highlights that while ChatGPT performs fairly well on medical accuracy (72% overall, 77% for final diagnoses), it can give “right answers” that are wrong for individual patients because it lacks full context such as allergies, lab nuances, and emotional factors. She warns about AI “hallucinations,” privacy risks from uploading sensitive data, and the danger of using it for prescriptions or complex diagnoses. Instead, she recommends using ChatGPT for safe tasks like decoding lab results, prepping for appointments, organizing supplements, and triaging mild issues—not as a replacement for clinical judgment. Full Article.

(Healthcare Dive) CommonSpirit Financial Turnaround Initiative

CommonSpirit Health has launched “Project Impact,” a comprehensive turnaround plan aimed at improving its financial stability after reporting a $225 million operating loss for fiscal year 2025—an improvement from the prior year but still below expectations. The initiative seeks to address expense control, revenue growth, and operational efficiency across eight focus areas, while the system braces for external challenges like new legislation and payer delays. Of course, with looming Medicaid cuts and mounting industry headwinds, pulling off this turnaround should be an absolute breeze. Full Article

(BenefitsPRO) ERISA Preemption of Arkansas PBM Law

A federal district court in Illinois ruled that the Employee Retirement Income Security Act (ERISA) does not preempt Arkansas’s Rule 128, which requires health plans to report pharmacy benefit manager (PBM) compensation data to ensure fair pharmacy payment practices. The decision clarifies that the state regulation applies broadly to health plans and not exclusively to ERISA-governed plans, signaling that self-funded employers may still be subject to state PBM reporting laws. Looks like since the federal government can’t do everything, the real battle over PBM regulation is heading to the states—because what’s one more patchwork of rules to keep things interesting? Full Article