WASHINGTON — For decades, politicians have blamed the country’s biggest doctor lobby for some of the health care systems problems. Now it faces a new line of attack as Republicans portray their health care cuts as fraud-fighting policies. 

The law requires that doctors bill for services in Medicare and Medicaid using Current Procedural Terminology, or CPT, codes, which are owned by the American Medical Association. The codes describe what services a patient received.

A key House Republican is requesting a meeting with Centers for Medicare and Medicaid Services officials to discuss their oversight of the CPT coding system as part of his committee’s investigation into fraud, waste, and abuse. In the letter, Rep. James Comer (Ky.) suggests the “complexity” of medical coding “may be contributing to improper billing and higher costs” and “creates an environment where billing inaccuracies can flourish.”

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Novel targets aim to stop lung scarring—where current drugs only slow it—while improving tolerability and unlocking fibrosis in other organs next

A closely watched therapy developed by Johnson & Johnson failed to show a statistically meaningful improvement for patients with inflammatory bowel disease. But the company plans to advance the drug into late-stage testing, focusing on a growing subgroup of patients. 

On Tuesday, trial investigators presented the results of Johnson & Johnson’s DUET study, testing how well combining the drugs Tremfya and Simponi would stop the immune system from mistakenly attacking healthy tissues in the digestive tract. It’s a follow-up to a 2022 clinical trial that showed a significant benefit to patients, nearly doubling the rates of disease remission and spurring several companies to start developing combination approaches for IBD. 

Johnson & Johnson tested its combined therapy, dubbed JNJ-4804, in two Phase 2b clinical trials hitting both major forms of inflammatory bowel disease — ulcerative colitis and Crohn’s disease. In each trial, the combination therapy performed better than the individual drugs, but did not meet the primary endpoint of clinical remission. 

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