The prospect of an effective new Alzheimer's treatment came roaring back this week with the announcement of preliminary clinical trial data, giving millions of seniors renewed hope after a tumultuous year.

Why it matters: Alzheimer's is a devastating disease, and the topline results boosted analysts' expectations for an entire class of drugs targeting the condition. But they also resurrect enormous questions about who'll cover the costs and how the U.S. will oversee what's likely a multi-billion dollar market.

A new drug can slow the insidious impact of Alzheimer’s disease, a major clinical trial has found.

Patients taking the drug, known as lecanemab, showed a 27% decrease in cognitive decline compared to a control group, according to developers Biogen, based in Cambridge, Massachusetts, and Eisai, headquartered in Tokyo, Japan.

“Starting as early as six months, across all time points, the treatment showed highly statistically significant changes in [dementia severity] from baseline compared to placebo,” the companies announced.

Walmart on Friday told employees that it will expand abortion and related travel coverage, according to an internal memo. The change comes about two months after the Supreme Court struck down the federal right to access the procedure.

Effective immediately, Walmart’s health-care plans will cover abortion “when there is a health risk to the mother, rape or incest, ectopic pregnancy, miscarriage or lack of fetal viability,” according to the memo to employees, which was reviewed by CNBC.

For days, a convoy of truckers has blocked the roads that serve the Port of Oakland, crippling a major West Coast cargo hub already hampered by global supply chain disruptions.

The protest is meant to send a message to Gov. Gavin Newsom: Keep the drivers clear of a California labor law that they say threatens their livelihood.

The trucker protests at the Port of Oakland have stopped the flow of trade for at least two days and some vessels are now either pulling up anchor to go to another port or skipping the port. In an effort to restore production, the port has established “Free Speech Zones” which were described in an open letter to the trucking community last night.

Independent truckers shut down the Port of Oakland as a protest against a labor law signed by California Gov. Gavin Newsom.

Since Monday, California truckers have been blocking access to the Port of Oakland with a protest against Assembly Bill 5 (AB5). The truck drivers successfully stopped operations at the Oakland port from Wednesday through Friday.

The U.S. health sector is not serving consumers as it should or could. Opaque, excessive, and often unconscionable prices both reduce access to care and threaten to wipe out the health savings account (HSA) balances and other savings of even insured Americans.1 Low‐​quality care costs lives, while bad policy confounds efforts to improve quality.2 Market concentration contributes to these deficiencies.

There’s plenty of blame to go around for the poor US performance during the Covid-19 pandemic, from the highly contagious virus itself to the Trump administration’s slow response to deep fissures in US politics and culture. But a new study from a group of scholars at Yale and UMass-Amherst says the US had more deaths per capita than most economic peers due to something more specific: the lack of universal health care.

Joe Biden’s election brought a new optimism that a public health insurance option could become a reality. But while the public option, a government-run insurance plan that competes with private insurers, seems to be off the table at the federal level, Nevada lawmakers are pushing to pass their own version before the end of their legislative session.

There are a number of concurrent crises playing out in the United States at the moment, as the country grapples with a runaway pandemic, a teetering economy, and absent national leadership, all of which are made worse by an American-made crisis that predates the current moment: the American health care crisis. In a country where health coverage has long been treated as a luxury, linked to certain kinds of white collar employment, the coronavirus has made health coverage an amenity fewer can afford.