"There shouldn't be anything controversial about helping people get the information they need to ensure they have affordable, comprehensive coverage, but the Trump administration's health care sabotage clearly has no limits." -- Senator Patty Murray (D-Wash.)

The Trump administration is eliminating most of the funding for grass-roots groups that help Americans get Affordable Care Act insurance and will for the first time urge the groups to promote health plans that bypass the law's consumer protections and required benefits. The reduction — the second round of cuts that began last summer — will shrink the federal money devoted to the groups, known as navigators, from $36.8 million to $10 million for the enrollment period that starts in November. (Amy Goldstein, Washington Post)

The Trump administration's latest blow to Obamacare is rattling health insurers as they draw up rate proposals, sparking new worries about huge premium increases just before midterm elections. The administration's decision to freeze a $10 billion program designed to protect insurers from big losses in Obamacare injected more volatility into insurance marketplaces, which President Trump's health department has sought to undermine. And the move swiftly drew new warnings from insurers that higher premium increases could soon follow when enrollment reopens in November. (Paul Demko, Politico)

The Trump administration is bound by a federal court decision to suspend billions of dollars in Obamacare payments, Centers for Medicare and Medicaid Services (CMS) Administrator Seema Verma said Thursday. "We really are in a tough spot," Verma told reporters. "I think that there's been a lot of discussion about whether the Trump administration is making a decision. We're not making a decision. The court has told us what to do here … at the end of the day, we have to abide by the court's ruling." In a surprise announcement last week, the administration said it had suspended $10.4 billion in "risk adjustment" funding that is supposed to be paid to insurers to help them provide coverage to particularly sick and costly enrollees. (Nathaniel Weixel, The Hill)

The liberal base is fired up about abortion rights, but Senate Democratic Leader Charles Schumer (N.Y.) will seek to emphasize access to affordable health care as much as Roe v. Wade in the battle over the Supreme Court. In sharp contrast to the Obama era, Schumer thinks health care is the Democrats' best weapon. By putting the charged issue of women's reproductive rights within the broader framework of access to health care, the matter is likely to be less polarizing in red states. (Alexander Bolton, The Hill)

Health care issues will be front and center during the upcoming Senate confirmation hearings for Brett Kavanaugh, President Trump's nominee for a pivotal seat on the U.S. Supreme Court. A number of important health care cases could make their way to the high court in the coming years, and Kavanaugh's vote could swing those decisions. They include a new Republican challenge to the constitutionality of the Affordable Care Act; a patient lawsuit against Medicaid work requirements; challenges to the Trump administration's cuts of ACA risk-corridor, risk-adjustment, and cost-sharing reduction payments to insurers; and lawsuits by Medicaid patients seeking the right to see the provider of their choice. (Harris Meyer, Modern Healthcare)

In the first 10 days of July, at least 10 drugmakers and biotechnology companies raised prices on at least 20 brand-name medicines, a review of pricing data from Rx Savings Solutions and Bloomberg Intelligence shows. The increases, for medications for cancer, diabetes, multiple sclerosis, and liver disease, were generally each less than 10 percent. But the price of one little-prescribed sleep aid was raised by more than 700 percent. (Robert Langreth and Cynthia Koons, Bloomberg News)

Median prices for over-the-counter, private-brand medicine sold by Walgreens Boots Alliance Inc. and CVS Health Corp. were about 20 percent higher than Basic Care, the over-the-counter drug line sold exclusively by Amazon, according to a report Friday by Jefferies Group analysts. Last week, Amazon announced that it was buying PillPack, a pharmacy company that will give it an entry point into the U.S.'s $328.6 billion market for prescription drugs. Shares of CVS and Walgreens plunged on the news, as investors bet Amazon could lure pharmacy customers with lower prices, and give them one less reason to go to the corner drugstore. (Aziza Kasumov, Bloomberg News)

The White House suggested on Thursday that Congress may need to pass a new law in order for states to impose work requirements on Medicaid beneficiaries. Mandatory work requirements could be key to motivating adults to work as there is evidence that many are choosing not to, according to a report issued by the Council of Economic Advisers, an agency within the Executive Office of the President. The council found that 60 percent of working-age Medicaid recipients who aren't disabled worked fewer than 20 hours per week. The report added there was a smaller unspecified amount of adult Medicaid enrollees who aren't disabled not working at all.  (Virgil Dickson, Modern Healthcare)

More than 7,000 people on Arkansas’s Medicaid expansion didn't meet a requirement that they report at least 80 hours of work in June and face the threat of losing their coverage if they fail to comply sometime before the end of this year, state officials said Friday. Arkansas’s requirement took effect last month. Participants in the program lose coverage if they don't meet the work requirement for three months in a calendar year. The Department of Human Services said most of the more than 27,000 people on the expansion program who were notified they were subject to the new requirement were exempt or met the requirement. The federal government earlier this year approved the state's plan to impose the work requirement as part of Arkansas’s expansion, which uses Medicaid funds to purchase private insurance for low-income residents. (Andrew Demillo, Associated Press)

Maryland Gov. Larry Hogan signed a contract with the federal government on Monday to enact the state's unique all-payer health care model, which he said will create incentives to improve care while saving money. Hogan signed the five-year contract along with the administrator of the federal Centers for Medicare and Medicaid Services, Seema Verma. "The Maryland model provides incentives across the health system to provide greater coordinated care, expanded patient-care delivery and collaboration of chronic-disease management ... all while improving the quality of care at lower cost to the consumer," Hogan said. He said the model emphasizes the quality of care over the quantity of care. (Associated Press)

Republicans for years have proclaimed the federal government’s decades-old War on Poverty a failure. "Americans are no better off today than they were before the War on Poverty began in 1964," House Speaker Paul D. Ryan (R-Wis.) wrote in his 2016 plan to dramatically scale back the federal safety net. Now the Trump administration is pitching a new message on anti-poverty programs, saying efforts that Republicans had long condemned as ineffective have already worked. The White House in a report this week declared the War on Poverty "largely over and a success," arguing that few Americans are truly poor -- only about 3 percent of the population -- and that the booming economy is the best path upward for those who remain in poverty.  (Jeff Stein and Tracy Jan, Washington Post)