Five states have voiced they want to testify at an upcoming July hearing in the ongoing court review of the $69 billion CVS Health acquisition of Aetna.

Emergency services are well known for charging high prices, often leaving patients on the hook for sky-high medical bills when those services are billed out of network. In particular, patients with private insurance face far higher charges for air ambulance compared to Medicare rates, according to a recent study published in Health Affairs.

Despite a major push from the Trump administration over the last few years to lower prescription drug costs, more than 3,400 drugs have seen price hikes during the first half of the year, according to a recent report.

Waves of criticism against Methodist Le Bonheur Healthcare, a nonprofit hospital based in Memphis, Tennessee, have prompted the institution to examine its aggressive debt collection practices of suing low-income patients for unpaid medical debts, as detailed by a recent ProPublica and MLK50 report.

Generic prescription drugs may not be the cost-saving alternative once thought under the current design of the Medicare Part D program, which gives away such heavy discounts for out-of-pocket costs for brand-name drugs that seniors are actually shelling out way more for generics, according to a study published in Health Affairs.

Bundled payments are helping lower overall healthcare costs, with joint replacement bundles saving about $1,000 per patient annually, according to a second annual report on the model from the Lewin Group.

Sanford Health and UnityPoint Health have agreed to merge to become an $11 billion nonprofit health system, making it among the 15 largest in the nation.

The University of Chicago and Google are facing a class action lawsuit after one former patient at UChicago’s medical center accused the institution of sharing patient records and violating privacy rights.