The result: The increase in grocery prices over the past 12 months climbed to 6.4%. It’s the steepest advance since a short-lived spike in 2008 and the second biggest gain since 1990.

What’s worse, prices are likely to remain high for a while. The cost of animal feed, farm crops for human consumption, fertilizer, packaging and transportation have also risen sharply.

High inflation has eaten away at Americans’ confidence in the economy and the Biden White House’s role in trying to tackle the problem. Republicans are putting the blame on Democrats to try to get a leg up on the pivotal 2022 congressional elections.

Some states are even considering junking or suspending grocery taxes to help out.

In the meantime Americans are paying the price — particular middle-class and less well-off families who spend a high proportion of their income on food. Just look at the increase in the cost of popular grocery items over the past year:

• Beef — 21%

• Pork — 16.8%

• Poultry — 8.4%

• Fresh seafood — 10.6%

• Eggs — 8%

• Fresh milk — 6%

• Fresh fruit — 5.8%

• Soft drinks — 7.4%

• Coffee — 7.5%

• Cooking oil — 12.9%

• Peanut butter — 6.8%

The Federal Reserve, the nation’s inflation-fighting body, has clearly been caught off guard by how fast inflation has risen.

Central bank leaders insist the rise in prices will subside toward the end of next year, but they are worried enough to speed up plans to end their massive stimulus program for the U.S. economy that some say has contributed to high inflation.

Economists also expect inflation to ease in 2022 as major supply-chain bottlenecks and shortages of materials and labor ease.

“The jump in food prices is largely due to higher oil prices and the pass-through of higher costs of transportation and fertilizer,” said senior economist Bill Adams of PNC Financial Services. “These sources of inflation should fade in 2022 as supply catches up with demand and supply chain turmoil subsides.”

Yet how quickly inflation fades, and how much, is still anyone’s guess.

For American families, relief can’t come fast enough. inflation is now outstripping a rapid increase in wages and making it harder to make ends meet.

The long-awaited “Sex and the City” reboot, which catches up with the now 50-something characters from HBO’s
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hit NSFW franchise, shocked fans by destroying the leading on-again, off-again couple’s hard-earned happily ever after. 

Yes, after six seasons and two films’ worth of drama, the new series gave fans a glimpse of Sarah Jessica Parker’s Carrie and Chris Noth’s “Mr. Big” (aka John James Preston) enjoying their early golden years together — before ending the episode with Big dying in Carrie’s arms after suffering a heart attack while taking a Peloton
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class in their penthouse.

And fans couldn’t help but wonder: what were the showrunners thinking?! Plenty took to Twitter
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to vent, or to take digs at the show. 

Reps from the show and HBO Max were not immediately available for comment.

Peloton also found itself spinning damage control on Thursday night and Friday morning. The company was not immediately available for comment. But it released a statement through cardiologist Dr. Suzanne Steinbaum, a member of Peloton’s Health & Wellness Advisory Council, that spins Big’s untimely demise as a result of his extravagant lifestyle — and not from riding a Peloton bike. 

“I’m sure SATC fans, like me, are saddened by the news that Mr. Big dies of a heart attack. Mr. Big lived what many would call an extravagant lifestyle—including cocktails, cigars, and big steaks—and was at serious risk as he had a previous cardiac event in Season 6,” she said in a statement to news outlets including the Los Angeles Times. 

“These lifestyle choices and perhaps even his family history, which often is a significant factor, were the likely cause of his death,” she continued. “Riding his Peloton bike may have even helped delay his cardiac event.”

And Peloton spokesperson Denise Kelly told BuzzFeed that the company was blindsided by how the bike was used in relation to Big’s death in the episode. 

“HBO procured the Peloton Bike on their own. Peloton was aware that a Bike would be used in the episode, and that Jess King would be portraying a fictional Peloton instructor,” Kelly said. “Due to confidentiality reasons, HBO did not disclose the larger context surrounding the scene to Peloton in advance.” 

Crock-Pot can certainly sympathize. The slow cooker brand was burned by the NBC
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drama “This Is Us” in 2018, when a heart-wrenching episode saw a slow cooker spark a kitchen fire that burned down the family’s home, resulting in the death of that show’s beloved leading man Jack (Milo Ventimiglia.) 

Devastated viewers initially reacted on social media by threatening to throw away their own Crock-Pots.

But Crock-Pot managed to put out the PR fire by launching a @crockpotcares Twitter account that responded to many viewers’ tweets, as well as publishing a lengthy Facebook post to try to reassure customers that its signature appliance isn’t going to roast them in their sleep. 

They also rolled out a “very special message” apology ad during the Super Bowl that showed Ventimiglia dishing himself a bowl of chili from a Crock-Pot with the hashtag #CrockPotIsInnocent popping up on the screen.

Read more: How that devastating ‘This Is Us’ fire actually boosted Crock-Pot sales

A month later, Ad Age reported that Crock-Pot sales actually increased $300,892. Maybe Peloton can take a page from Crock-Pot’s playbook? 

It’s been a year of ups and downs for Peloton, and the “Sex and the City” plot twist certainly didn’t help. On Friday, its stock was downgraded to neutral from outperform at Credit Suisse, after shares skidded 11% to $40.70 on Thursday, the day the episode aired. 

And in May, the company voluntarily recalled 125,000 treadmills after more than 29 reports of injuries to children, and one death. It also recalled 1,050 Tread treadmills, saying the touch screen can detach and fall and pose a risk of injury.

The Fed revealed last month that the losses exposed vulnerabilities, and have now followed up with more guidance for banks to step up their due diligence efforts.

“When initiating a relationship and on an ongoing basis, firms should  obtain critical information regarding size, leverage, largest or most concentrated positions, and  number of prime brokers with sufficient detail or frequency to determine the fund’s ability to  service its debt,” said a letter to banks from Michael S. Gibson, director of the Division of Supervision and Regulation at the Fed.

“If a client refuses to provide this information, firms should consider whether it is consistent with safe and sound practices for them to begin or maintain a relationship with the  fund or whether they can use strong compensating measures, such as significantly more stringent  contractual terms, to mitigate the risk,” Gibson said.

Gibson said his recommendations remain consistent with its interagency supervisory guidance on counterparty credit risk management, which promotes failsafes for banks.

Banks should receive adequate information with appropriate frequency to understand the risks of the investment fund; ensure the risk-management and governance approach applied to the investment fund is capable of identifying the fund’s risk initially and monitoring it throughout the relationship; and ensure that margin practices remain appropriate to the fund’s risk profile as it evolves,  Gibson noted.

Banks should also avoid inflexible and risk-insensitive margin terms or extended close-out periods with  their investment fund clients. 

Looking at Medicare prescription-drug plans offering any coverage of Tecfidera or its generic equivalent as of the third quarter of this year, drug-pricing research nonprofit 46brooklyn Research found that more than half of enrollees had access only to the brand-name drug—despite the fact that multiple lower-cost generic options have been available for about a year. Even when plans did cover the generic, the cost was generally far higher than the cheapest generic’s list price, the researchers found.

“It’s a series of broken incentives that lead to this type of outcome,” says 46brooklyn CEO Antonio Ciaccia, including issues with “rebates,” or discounts that drugmakers often pay to Part D plan sponsors and other middlemen after a drug is dispensed.

“Just having generics in the market doesn’t mean that people can get them, or that they are affordable,” says Bari Talente, executive vice president of advocacy and healthcare access for the National Multiple Sclerosis Society. The group has heard from patients and healthcare providers about challenges with Tecfidera and generic access that echo 46brooklyn’s findings, Talente says.

The research adds to a growing number of studies illustrating how generic competition for pricey specialty drugs, when filtered through the convoluted Medicare Part D prescription-drug system, can fail to generate cost savings for patients.

The findings come as Congress weighs prescription-drug pricing and Medicare Part D reforms as part of the Build Back Better social spending bill. President Joe Biden highlighted the issue in a speech this week, noting that the bill would cap Medicare beneficiaries’ out-of-pocket prescription-drug costs at $2,000 per year, among other changes.  

For many Medicare patients, it was as if the price war never happened

Broadly speaking, most Part D plans are designed to favor the use of generics over brand-name drugs, according to a 2020 study published in Health Affairs. Looking at the plans’ coverage of brand names versus generic equivalents, the researchers found that the plans had generic-only coverage in more than 80% of cases. But “there are obviously some major exceptions to this rule,” says Stacie Dusetzina, associate professor at Vanderbilt University Medical Center and co-author of the study, including some cases involving costly specialty drugs. The exceptions “are very important because the effect on consumers is so negative,” she says. “The idea that you can’t access these low-cost drugs and pay less is incredibly frustrating.”

After the first generic version of Tecfidera launched in August of last year, the competition was fast and furious. Within a few months, 11 manufacturers were making the drug, driving the median monthly generic wholesale acquisition cost for the 240 milligram capsules down to about $900—a roughly 90% discount to the Tecfidera list price of $8,276, according to 46brooklyn.

Tecfidera sales stumbled. The brand-name product was Biogen’s top-selling drug in 2019, with about $4.4 billion in sales. The company sold about $1.5 billion worth of the drug in the first nine months of this year. Late last month, a federal appeals court rejected Biogen’s effort to revive a key patent on Tecfidera.

For many Medicare patients, it was as if the price war never happened. Despite their bargaining power, the largest Part D plans generally gave enrollees a worse deal on the drug than their smaller counterparts, the 46brooklyn study found. The largest plans tended to offer brand-name-only coverage, according to the study, whereas smaller plans were more likely to cover both the brand name and generic or only the generic. And looking at Part D plans’ lowest negotiated price for any version of the drug—brand or generic—the researchers found that large plans’ prices were often even higher than Tecfidera’s list price, whereas the smallest plans had some of the lowest negotiated prices.

“The largest plans have greater resources, sophistication and leverage” to offer consumers the lowest-cost options, 46brooklyn’s Ciaccia says, yet “we found it was the exact opposite of that.”  

Four large companies—Humana
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CVS
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Centene
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and Anthem
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—offer Medicare plans with brand-name-only Tecfidera coverage, collectively covering more than 23 million people, according to 46brooklyn. Humana, CVS and Centene did not respond to requests for comment. Anthem referred questions to the Pharmaceutical Care Management Association, a trade group for pharmacy benefit managers, which handle prescription-drug benefits on behalf of Part D plans and other payers. That group said in a statement, “On behalf of patients, PBMs support achieving the lowest net price for prescription drugs, whether it is through use of a generic, an authorized generic, or a brand drug.”  

In some cases, a single parent company owns a large health plan, a specialty pharmacy and a pharmacy benefit manager, creating potential conflicts of interest that may interfere with consumers getting the best price, researchers say. More transparency is needed “to understand how the dollars are flowing,” Dusetzina says. Where plans, PBMs, and pharmacies are all part of the same parent company, she says, “we’ve created a system that could keep rewarding itself by not negotiating as much as they can and not trying to get the best price for the Medicare program.”

Some provisions of the Build Back Better bill may help smooth out Part D’s quirks

Kristine Grow, a spokesperson for the health plan trade group AHIP, said the number of generic medications prescribed to seniors has climbed sharply since the introduction of Medicare Part D, “delivering significant savings to enrollees and taxpayers.” The problem, she said, is the drug prices set by the pharmaceutical industry. The 46brooklyn report, she says, “is based on a bogus premise.” PBMs pass rebates through to Medicare plans, “which use those savings to lower premiums and offset other health care costs for seniors,” she says.

But Michael Bagel, director of public policy for the Alliance of Community Health Plans, a trade group for nonprofit plans, says his group supports transparency requirements that would shine more light on price-setting issues. Many of the questions raised by the 46brooklyn report are “because of the lack of sunshine into the pricing process and into what discounts and rebates are being passed on,” he says.

Some provisions of the Build Back Better bill may help smooth out Part D quirks that can favor brands over generics, researchers say. The bill would eliminate the “coverage gap,” a phase of the Part D benefit in which manufacturers provide a 70% discount on brand-name drugs—but not generics. Those brand-name discounts count toward patients’ out-of-pocket spending, which can help them reach the more generous catastrophic coverage phase faster than they would with a generic. That can lead to some counterintuitive outcomes for patients. In the first three years of generic competition for the cancer drug Gleevec, for example, Medicare patients saw their out-of-pocket costs climb if they switched from the brand-name drug to the generic, according to a 2020 study by Dusetzina and her coauthors.

The bill would also increase Part D plans’ responsibility for costs in the catastrophic coverage phase to 60%, up from 15% today.

But much remains to be done, researchers say, to make the system more navigable for consumers who just want to find the most affordable way to fill their prescriptions. “This is a four-month research project that we did,” Ciaccia says of the Tecfidera study, “and we’re drug-pricing nerds. Grandma and grandpa aren’t going to figure this one out. It shouldn’t be this complex.”