“For the first time, CMS is organizing and focusing our efforts to apply a rural lens to the vision and work of the agency,” CMS Administrator Seema Verma, MPH, said in a statement.

After reporting nearly $18 million in savings for the employers current participating in its bundled payment programs for spinal surgeries and joint replacements, UnitedHealth Group announced it will expand the program to nine additional markets.

Vermont has become the first state to pass a law to allow prescription drugs to be imported from Canada, but the plan still has to be approved by HHS—a tall order considering HHS Secretary Alex Azar’s comments that pharmaceutical imports are a “gimmick” and may be unsafe.

A judge in Riverside County, California, ruled the state legislature violated the law by passing the state’s aid-in-dying act during a special session limited to healthcare funding, giving the state’s attorney general five days to respond or else it would again be illegal for terminal patients to be given life-ending drugs by physicians.

The potential of genetic testing for chronic disease is substantial—and these possible positives are understood by many primary care providers (PCPs). Still, many feel unprepared to deal with patients at high risk for such conditions, while others questioned their ability to interpret genetic testing results.

The Healthcare Facilities Accreditation Program (HFAP) has released the 2018 edition of its annual quality report, illustrating how deficiencies were most commonly found at the hospitals and ambulatory surgical centers (ASCs) it inspects.

The “zero year” of the OneCare Vermont system, operated much like an accountable care organization (ACO) on a statewide level, saw the program come within 1 percent of its financial target. With the model now expanded to cover about 18 percent of the state’s residents, other states are watching closely to see if it could be implemented elsewhere in the U.S.

In the latest article in Vox’s series on hospital billing practices, Jessica Pell told a story that isn’t a one-off case: She went to an emergency room (ER), received a minimal amount of help and still got saddled with a massive bill.

A report commissioned by the Massachusetts Health & Hospital Association found it would cost the state’s hospitals nearly $1 billion a year to comply with a proposed ballot initiative to set limits on the number of patients a hospital can assign to a nurse per shift.

Iowa’s “supplemental payment plan” for nursing homes was rejected by CMS over concerns about having county hospitals assume the licenses of for-profit nursing homes.