Continuing a flurry of big mergers and acquisitions around healthcare as 2017 winds down, health insurer Humana is reportedly in “advanced talks” to buy Kindred Healthcare with help from two private equity firms.

The administration of President Donald Trump has settled a long-running lawsuit over cost-sharing reduction subsidies paid to insurers as part of the Affordable Care Act (ACA), potentially paving the way for the payments to be restored.

The Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) disputed a report in the Washington Post that seven words or phrases, including “fetus,” “transgender” and “science-based,” had been banned from the agency’s budget documents, while other officials said the motivation was to avoid words that could limit chances of obtaining funding from Congress.

New data has been added to the CMS Physician Compare website, allowing the public to see star ratings based on Physician Quality Reporting System (PQRS) scores and practice information for patient satisfaction scores.

Current online patient portals do not present test information in an easily understandable context for the majority of patients, according to a study published in the Journal of the American Medical Informatics Association.

Reporting for the Merit-based Incentive Payment System (MIPS) is particularly vulnerable to fraud, OIG said, because it relies on clinicians on submitting their own data—and allows them to resubmit data to change their score.

Israel-based Teva Pharmaceuticals, the largest generic drugmaker in the world, will be laying off 14,000 employees, a quarter of its workforce worldwide, including “significant” cuts to its 7,000 U.S. workers.

CMS’s move to cut Medicare payments made through the 340B drug discount programs would see the biggest impact in California, New York and North Carolina, according to an analysis by Avalere Health, though for most hospitals it will reduce their total Part B revenue by less than 5 percent.