Medicare & Medicaid

Caroline Pearson of the Peterson Health Technology Institute says the way health care pays for clinical AI will decide whether it lowers costs or drives them up.

The top news stories in medicine this week.

The CBO projects about 5.2 million adults will drop off Medicaid under the new rules that begin Jan. 1. Medical Economics spoke with Pear Suite co-founder and CEO Colby Takeda about the CHW workforce states are leaning on to reach them.

Kansas court records reviewed by The New York Times show the practice charged 18% annual interest, garnished bank accounts and pursued arrest warrants over balances as small as $101.

The Pay PCPs Act of 2026 would blend prospective per-patient payments with fee-for-service, halve beneficiary cost sharing for primary care and exempt participating physicians from MIPS.

Health care economist Wayne Winegarden, Ph.D., says two decades of inflation-eroded Medicare payment, not corporate ownership, is what keeps pushing independent practices to sell.

The top news stories in medicine today.

The top news stories in medicine this week.

Quality, revenue, utilization, documentation and savings are not all the same thing

Emergency department self-pay visits rose from 5.5% to 7.6% of encounters, the steepest of four care settings tracked, while Medicaid's share declined across the board, according to Epic Research

Lawrence Casalino, M.D., Ph.D., M.P.H., argues that as medicine consolidates, physicians are increasingly treated as interchangeable parts, and that the damage shows up in the parts of care no quality program measures.

Despite major problems across U.S. health care, evidence shows what primary care is getting right.

An HHS video sent patients to a Medicare comment docket that has already drawn more than 19,000 submissions.

The top news stories in medicine this week.

Fifteen years of research hasn't moved the federal rules that keep new physician-owned hospitals from opening.

Dolly Parton, who died Aug. 25, 2026, at 80, funded research at Vanderbilt, a women's health center in her home county and the Knoxville children's hospital that bears her name.

The top news stories in medicine this week.

Retrospective data are not irrelevant, but primary care needs AI and advanced analytics to treat real-world patients in real time.

A new JD Power study shows satisfaction with Medicare Advantage falling for the second year in a row. For primary care physicians, the numbers explain a lot about what's landing on their desks.

Meanwhile, patients will pay because employers expect health insurance premiums to rise 10% in 2027.

The top news stories in medicine this week.

The clinical data to identify mismatched coverage — and fix it before it becomes bad debt — is already sitting in your EHR.

Medicare's proposed 2027 reimbursement rates would fall below the cost of RPM devices, risking declines in physician pay and patient health

A JAMA analysis of nearly 250,000 board-certified internists puts hard numbers on how much underserved patient care rests on physicians born outside the U.S., just as visa policy tightens around them.

Physicians have questions about capitation. Here's what it means for your practice.