Patients are getting fed up with healthcare organizations who haven’t made their payment processes and communications as convenient as other industries. With Silicon Valley giants like Apple and Amazon eyeing the healthcare space, the time to ditch old, inefficient methods is now, according to Deirdre Ruttle, vice president of strategy at payment networks company InstaMed.

Premiums on the Affordable Care Act (ACA) exchanges could be in for another double-digit increase if HHS moves ahead with a proposed rule to expand the availability of short-term insurance plans which don’t comply with the ACA.

HHS Secretary Alex Azar is set to meet this week with Idaho Gov. Butch Otter and the state’s insurance director, Dean Cameron, over their recently announced plans to allow insurers to offer coverage that doesn’t follow the Affordable Care Act (ACA), while Iowa is considering a similar move through its state legislature.

To help combat opioid addiction and abuse, the American Medical Association (AMA) suggested the Senate consider more than a dozen policies on everything from allowing Medicare to cover methadone in outpatient treatment programs to creating an addiction treatment-centered alternative payment model.

The Center for American Progress (CAP), a liberal-leaning think tank, has added a proposal to the debate on how to achieve universal health coverage but without moving the U.S. to a single-payer healthcare system—though providers would be paid less than they currently are by private insurance and hospitals would need to adapt to a big expansion of bundled payments.

Two Catholic health systems, Maryland-based Bon Secours and Cincinnati’s Mercy Health have announced plans to merge into a 43-hospital system stretching across seven states in the eastern half of the U.S.

A month after HHS’s Office of Civil Rights (OCR) launched its new division focused on investigating religious or moral objections by healthcare professionals, more than 300 individuals have sent in complaints about their rights being violated, according to The Hill.

The tax cut legislation signed into law late last year will help most for-profit hospitals in 2018, boosting their bottom lines at a time when several major chains are struggling with weak admissions and making acquisitions and capital investments more attractive.