Policy and Legislation
The Department of Health and Human Services (HHS) has awarded more than $971 million to continue improving preparedness and health outcomes for a wide range of public health threats within every state, eight U.S. territories and four of the nation's largest metropolitan areas, HHS officials announced Monday.
A new tracking poll conducted by Kaiser Family Foundation in the wake of the Supreme Court ruling on the Affordable Care Act showed that slightly more Americans approved of the decision with 47 percent voicing approval and 43 percent disapproving.
Large pharmaceutical company GlaxoSmithKline (GSK) has agreed to pay $3 billion in order to resolve charges of engaging in illegal schemes related to unlawful marketing and pricing of some of the drugs it manufactures in what has become the largest healthcare fraud scheme in the country's history.
As part of the ACA, the Supreme Court upheld a new tax provision intended to help fund healthcare reform -- a 2.3 percent excise tax on medical device sales beginning Jan. 1, 2013.
Healthcare organizations that were previously sitting along the sidelines when it came to healthcare reform are going to have to get the ball rolling now that the Supreme Court has made the ruling to uphold the 2010 healthcare law, according to a report published Friday by the PwC Health Research Institute (HRI).
Last week's Supreme Court decision on the Affordable Care Act provided a setback to the Obama Administration by ruling that while the federal government can expand the Medicaid program, it cannot withhold funds from states that choose not to participate in the expansion.
The National Quality Forum voted to uphold its decision to endorse an all-cause hospital-wide readmissions measure, which had been challenged by seven hospitals.
Chief Justice Roberts is very smart, and quite possibly pretty sly as well. I have been reading through the Supreme Court's landmark decision on health reform (which like many others, I predicted wrongly).
How do officials in the public health sector feel about the final 5-4 decision? For the most part, positively -- though many officials emphasize it's just the first step on a long road to reform.
Government Health IT Editor Tom Sullivan spoke with Bill Bernstein, chairman of the healthcare division at law firm Manatt, Phelps & Phillips, which works with states and providers on health IT and related public policy issues, on the implication of the Supreme Court's ACA ruling and how it affects how the law will ultimately play out, health IT projects, and the impact it could have on Republican presumptive nominee Mitt Romney, who has been stumping on ACA repeal.