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).

Kansas’s proposal to impose a three-year lifetime limit on Medicaid benefits has been formally rejected by CMS, with Administrator Seema Verma, MPH, saying the agency has to ensure the program “remains a safety net for those that need it most.”

New Hampshire will become the fourth state to impose work requirements on Medicaid beneficiaries, according to a May 7 joint statement from CMS, HHS and New Hampshire Governor Chris Sununu.

At last week’s campaign-style rally in Michigan, President Donald Trump claimed he’d done away with the Affordable Care Act (ACA) when the 2017 tax bill repealed the individual mandate. But folks at the Internal Revenue Service (IRS), though, would disagree. A recent report from the New York Times examines IRS's plan to send out penalty notices to more than 30,000 businesses in the U.S.