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Nursing homes won some small relief on payment cuts, but hospitals were less fortunate as Governor Raimondo's Reinventing Medicaid Act of 2015 emerged from the House Finance Committee last week. The committee, meanwhile, left intact the governor's proposal to place the savings from those Medicaid cuts into a pool that in future years can be used to reward health-care providers for improving the quality of care while lowering costs. On Tuesday, the full House is expected to act on the budget. (Salit, 6/15)

Many Los Angeles County doctors who treat the poor in California’s Medi-Cal managed care program have earned poor grades on safety, cleanliness and other measures the state uses to monitor health care delivery for some of the state’s most vulnerable patients. Those poor marks, moreover, are often an indicator of even more serious problems. State records show that doctors who fail the managed care plans’ internal reviews or pass conditionally are twice as likely as other physicians to have been disciplined by the Medical Board of California, which licenses doctors and oversees the medical profession. (Urevich, 6/15)

Tennessee is asking a federal appeals court to throw out a class-action lawsuit that claims the state left thousands of TennCare applicants in indefinite limbo, with their applications neither approved nor rejected. With the rollout of the Affordable Care Act in October 2013, the government changed the method used to determine financial eligibility for Medicaid. But in Tennessee, a new computer system designed to accommodate the change was behind schedule. So the federal government agreed temporarily to accept applications for TennCare — Tennessee's version of Medicaid — on behalf of the state. (Loller, 6/16)

The California State Auditor on Tuesday is slated to release a report 10 months in the making that will analyze the efficacy of the Medi-Cal managed care program. Medi-Cal is California's Medicaid program. (Gorn, 6/15)