Lawmakers are getting busy this week with several hearings eyeing the competitive affects of vertical integration, different paths toward universal coverage, and how to prevent surprise medical bills.

Lawmakers in California and Florida will debate bills that would affect how hospitals calculate their community benefit and charity care.

The Republican state attorneys general challenging the Affordable Care Act urged a federal judge in Texas to let Democrats immediately appeal his ruling striking down the law.

A federal judge in Texas on Friday struck down the Affordable Care Act as unconstitutional, ruling that the law's individual mandate could not be severed from the rest of President Barack Obama's landmark healthcare law. The White House says the ACA will stand during the appeals process.

Northwell Health is poised to open what it's calling the world's largest medical sterilization center. The $80 million facility will clean 22 million instruments per year.

In a dramatic overhaul of the current 1332 waiver process, the CMS said state legislatures will no longer have to approve waiver plans. Instead, governors will be able to take action on their own. The agency also changed how it will evaluate waivers.

In the largest HIPAA settlement ever, Anthem will pay the federal government $16 million over its 2015 data breach that affected nearly 79 million people.

Heritage Provider Network founder and CEO Dr. Richard Merkin says his goal is to continually push the envelope and try things that haven't been done before.

Although the Justice Department stopped short of asking a federal judge to overturn the ACA, the agency echoed the core arguments of the Republican state attorneys general: that the ACA can't stand without the individual mandate's tax penalty.

A federal judge ruled the federal government hadn't shown that statements the insurer made about billing data accuracy would have affected payment of the claims.

Twenty states sued the federal government to scrap the Affordable Care Act, claiming the repeal of the individual mandate's tax penalty rendered the law unconstitutional.

A Florida-based provider accused Allscripts of failing to take necessary precautions to prevent a ransomware attack that shut down its cloud-based EHR and forced clients to cancel business.

Intermountain Healthcare, Ascension, SSM Health and Trinity Health have joined forces to create a generic-drug company to create cheaper and more available alternatives than they can now obtain on the market.

A federal judge on Friday allowed the CMS to move forward with its planned $1.6 billion cut to a federal drug discount program, saying the nation's leading hospital associations will have to challenge the changes after they go into effect.