Individuals from Mississippi were indicted for defrauding insurance companies for $200 million with high-priced compounded formulations and bribing providers—including dentists, physicians and nurse practitioners—to prescribe those medications to patients they never examined.

CMS recently announced Medicare’s hospital insurance (HI) fund will be depleted by 2026—three years earlier than previously projected. A new report from the American Academy of Actuaries examined the numbers—finding eliminating the HI deficit would require an immediate 28 percent increase in standard payroll taxes.

Emergency departments, particularly in rural areas, are strained by shortages of physicians and other providers, including nonemergency doctors and advanced practice providers, according to a new study published in the Annals of Emergency Medicine.

The Agency for Healthcare Research and Quality (AHRQ) estimated 8,000 deaths were prevented and $2.9 billion was saved between 2014 and 2016 through successful initiatives to reduce hospital-acquired conditions, including infections, injuries from falls and adverse drugs events.

CMS has released a new a “scorecard” tracking quality measures of states within Medicaid and the Children’s Health Insurance Program (CHIP), but the National Association of Medicaid Directors (NAMD) said it failed to offer a true apples-to-apples comparison of state performance.

Hospitals will be expected to perform fewer unnecessary C-sections, cut down on imaging procedures for lower back pain and prescribe fewer opioids. If they don’t do so by the end of 2019, Covered California will try to get participating health insurers to exclude those hospitals from their networks.

The report from Illinois' Cook County inspector general pinned much of the blame on the system’s bureaucracy, citing “a significant number of registration clerks, coders and billers who do not possess adequate self-motivation or the required skill sets and knowledge base” to do the jobs they’ve been assigned.

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.