After days of tense negotiations, the House and Senate left town Thursday with no plan to avoid a partial government shutdown. The House will return December 19, leaving only 72 hours for both parties to reach an agreement before a shutdown goes into effect at midnight on December 21. Most of the tension surrounding the potential shutdown surrounds funding for President Trump’s border wall. This week, NCCS hosted a post-election webinar [...]

CMS Issues New Waiver Options to Undermine the Affordable Care Act — This week, the Centers for Medicare and Medicaid Services (CMS) released four new waiver concepts that would allow states to pursue alternatives to the ACA. This announcement follows recent CMS guidance that outlined broad authority to the states to design their health care systems through a waiver of key ACA requirements and provides states with more specific [...]

NCCS hosted the 3rd annual Ellen L. Stovall Award for Innovation in Patient-Centered Cancer Care reception. Named for former NCCS CEO, Ellen Stovall, who died in 2016 due to complications from three cancer treatments, the award seeks to highlight those who continue Ellen’s work of transforming cancer care to further incorporate patients’ goals, needs, and values. This year’s honorees are Gay Crawford, founding director of Cancer CAREpoint, and Dr. Norman Coleman, senior investigator at the National Cancer Institute. [...]

Open Enrollment for ACA Now Underway — Open enrollment for 2019 ACA plans began yesterday and will run through December 15, 2018. Despite numerous attempts to repeal the ACA in 2017 and an ongoing court case in Texas, the ACA continues ahead, business as usual, for the most part. Many Americans will qualify for financial help that lowers their monthly premiums to between $50 and $100. Tara Siegel Bernard reports in the New York Times [...]