Year-over-year price growth was 2.2 percent in April 2018, which Altarum said was fractionally above the March rate, setting a six-year high for price growth in the sector. Hospital price growth fell slightly to 3.7 percent.

Four states held primary elections on May 8, kicking off a busy election season that will see most Tuesdays from now until mid-September having one or more states’ voters casting ballots. Judging by the latest poll from the Kaiser Family Foundation, healthcare will be a major issue for many in the coming months.

President Donald Trump is set to deliver a speech on pharmaceutical prices on May 11—but rather than matching his campaign rhetoric saying drug industry is “getting away with murder,” he’s expected to be cheered by pharma companies for calling for foreign countries to pay more for drugs, rather than bring down prices in the U.S.

When hospitals enjoy a monopoly in their market, their prices for privately insured patients are 12.5 percent higher on average, according to a study encompassing 88 million people covered by Aetna, Humana and UnitedHealthcare. The differences disappeared when consolidating facilities were located more than 25 miles apart.

Japan’s Takeda Pharmaceuticals has announced it will acquire Shire, an Ireland-based drug company, for $62 billion, making Takeda one of the 10 largest pharma firms in the world.

Sen. Lamar Alexander, R-Tennessee, has said he’s abandoning efforts to push a bipartisan bill meant to stabilize the Affordable Care Act (ACA) exchanges, putting the blame on Democrats’ resistance to making changes to the law. With no congressional action likely this far into an election year, exchange insurers are requesting some eye-popping hikes for 2019 premiums.

“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.

President Donald Trump is looking to a rarely-utilized process called “rescission” to cut $15 billion in federal spending he already signed into law earlier this year—with much of the reductions coming from programs like the Centers for Medicare and Medicaid Innovation (CMMI) and the Children’s Health Insurance Program (CHIP).