A new research letter reports that doctors who received free meals and other kinds of payments from pharmaceutical companies tended to prescribe more opioid painkillers to their patients over the course of a year. Meanwhile, doctors who didn't get such freebies cut back on their opioid prescriptions.

Sen. Lamar Alexander, R-Tennessee, has said he’s abandoning efforts to push a bipartisan bill meant to stabilize the Affordable Care Act (ACA) exchanges, putting the blame on Democrats’ resistance to making changes to the law.

About 4 million Americans lost health insurance in the last two years, according to a new survey from the Commonwealth Fund, which attributed the decline to actions taken by the Trump administration.

In a speech this week, Gottlieb suggested that the federal government should “re-examine” how rebates are treated under federal antikickback laws. Right now, those rebates don’t count as kickbacks.

Some Republican lawmakers continue to try to work around the federal health law’s requirements. That strategy can crop up in surprising places. Like the farm bill.

Health and Human Services Secretary Alex Azar said the administration is working on a plan to tackle high drug prices that would go “much further” than the proposals in President Trump’s budget.