GOP Health Reform

CMS says about 1,300 entities have agreed to participate in the Trump administration's first advanced alternative pay model, the Bundled Payments for Care Improvement Advanced, and Christina Smith Ritter, the director of the Patient Care Models Group at CMS' innovation center said that participation reflects an understanding that value-based pay is where the health care system is heading.

The Senate’s Saturday confirmation of Judge Brett Kavanaugh fills the lone vacancy on the Supreme Court and adds an expected conservative vote to the high court’s term that could include several pressing health policy cases.

GOP senators on the Budget Committee want the Congressional Budget Office to do a real-world test of its updated health insurance simulation model -- which estimates coverage and premiums for the under-65 population -- by redoing the initial Affordable Care Act coverage and spending estimates to see if they would match more closely to what has transpired.

A nonpartisan forum of state policy advisers will hire a consultant next month to help a handful of states create drug price transparency programs, and in turn hopes to develop a plan that other states could use to require price transparency -- an issue likewise central in the national drug-pricing debate.

A Dallas-based community organization that had previously received the largest amount of grant funding of all navigators in Texas to help people seeking to enroll in coverage through the health insurance exchanges will get zero dollars for the upcoming open enrollment season, but still seeks to provide services to area residents.

A federal judge in DC on Tuesday (Oct. 2) scheduled a hearing for Oct. 26 on stakeholders' motion to immediately suspend the administration's short-term health plan rule.

CMS Administrator Seema Verma on Tuesday (Oct. 2) again defended the Trump administration’s backing of Medicaid work requirements and criticized Medicare for All proposals for endangering the program at the expense of vulnerable seniors at the Atlantic’s annual ideas festival in Washington.

The North Dakota Insurance Department is developing a legislative proposal that would create state-based insurance plans, similar to Idaho's, that would allow issuers to offer products not fully compliant with the Affordable Care Act.

In a win for the dialysis industry, California Gov. Jerry Brown (D) on Sunday (Sept. 30) vetoed legislation (SB 1156) that would have limited dialysis pay in commercial insurance to Medicare levels for patients who receive premium assistance from industry-funded charities.