Policy and Legislation

"Instead of imposing this unfunded mandate, Congress should delink the disease classification system from reimbursement policy, and make the adoption of the new ICD-10 code system voluntary until a less burdensome billing process is in place," The Heritage Foundation wrote in a May 18 report.

Assistant Secretary Jan Frye claims VA improperly spent at least $5 billion a year on medical equipment, sparking inquiry.

Steven Stack, the incoming president of the American Medical Association, says problems with ICD-10 for physicians are too big to allow it to move forward.

In a letter to House leadership, Rep. Scott Peters, D-Calif. and 17 other Democrats are calling for lawmakers to act quickly on a bill repealing the medical device tax before Memorial Day.

States that expand get billions of additional federal dollars, but many Republican lawmakers are loathe to say yes to the Obama administration.

Study by Standard & Poor's finds a number of provider-owned health plans and cooperative insurers may not get the funding they had hoped for.

About 186,000 people in Louisiana signed up for health insurance under the law and almost all of them got help from the federal government to pay their premiums.

Text of a bill by Rep. Ted Poe, R-Texas, to delay the switch to ICD-10 diagnostic coding surfaced on Monday, in which it requests further study on the disruption on healthcare providers could face resulting from the replacement of ICD-9.

Legislative tracking site govtrack.us gives the bill, submitted by Texas Rep. Ted Poe, a 1 percent chance of ever being enacted.

Paul Keckley, managing director for Navigant Center Healthcare Research and Policy Analysis, says King v. Burwell will decide much of the controversial reform's fate.