This is Scott Becker with the Becker Private Equity and Business Podcast. Today's topic is the retail pharmacies, the big payers, and a new book. Here's our discussion today. First, looking at the two big retail pharmacies, this has been a tough year in the retail pharmacy business. Walgreens, well, it was up seven % yesterday, is down 39 % year to date. Cvs is down about 21 % year to date. They're only not down as much as Walgreens because they're probably a little bit better managed, and they've also got that big payer business with Aetna. Second, the big payers. We're going to go through the six big payers, and of course, there's discussion with Humana and Cigna merging. United is the only payer that's up here to date, and that's really based on their provider business, not their payer business. They're up 3.4 % year to date. Tvs is down almost 21 %. Cigna is down 22%. Elevins is down seven %. Humana is down 6.23%. And Centine, which is the biggest Medicaid payer in the country, is down nine and a half %. The third thing I'll talk about is we just finished a book, actually finished it some time ago, and through all these debacles of self-publishing, our first self-publishing went broke.

What a disaster that was. My due diligence, and that was very poor. This book is called Blocking and Attackling: 60 keys to building a business and managing your money. It is a can read book. I wouldn't call it yet a must read book, but we're working at it. I co-authored it with a brilliant producer from Executive Podcast Solutions, Grace Lynn Coward. She did a fantastic job. The second edition will be even better, we promise. It took us so long to finish this work that at some point we got a little tired of constantly updating and trying to fix and improve and make it better that we promise we'll make this book better again next time. That's just a joke for those are too politically inclined or too too sensitive, one way or the other. In any event, those are three of the stories we're following today. I know if those are a PS. I do believe that ultimately the presence of Harvard, Penn, MIT, that they couldn't stand up and say that calling for the genocide of Jews or the genocide of other races, it violates the code of conduct on campus, that they ought to be fired.

Thank you for listening to the Becker private equity and Business Podcast. Thank you very much.