Under the House bill, states that have caps on non-economic damage awards could keep those in place. In states without such caps, even if the state constitution prohibits them or state courts have struck them down, the federal $250,000 cap would apply.
State officials are hoping to win a 21-month extension of an agreement that began in 2011 and will expire in December. The Trump administration signed off on a similar pact with Florida in April.
Senators had promised that their ACA replacement would be very different than the version that passed the House in May, but the bill instead follows the House’s lead in many ways.
“A lot of hospitals like [ours] could get hurt,” says Kerry Noble, CEO of Pemiscot Memorial Health Systems, which runs the public hospital in Pemiscot County, one of the poorest in Missouri.
Built into the Senate ACA replacement bill are loopholes for states to bypass those protections and erode coverage for preexisting conditions. That could lead to perverse situations in which insurers are required to cover chronically ill people but not the diseases they...
Nurses are at the core of an anti-sepsis initiative at St. Joseph Hoag Health in California. From 2015 to 2016, the death rate for all of its hospitals dropped from 15 percent to 12 percent for severe sepsis/shock, and from 12 percent to 9 percent for all sepsis cases...
Senior administrative officials met Friday to discuss an executive order on the cost of pharmaceuticals, a roundtable informed by Trump’s "Drug Pricing and Innovation Working Group."
