Katheryn Houghton, Kaiser Health News

Montana officials are looking to tighten rules around medically necessary abortions for those who use Medicaid as their health insurance. Reproductive health advocates and Democratic lawmakers have said the move is part of a broader agenda to whittle away access to the procedure.

A Montana addiction clinic’s plan to give people with substance use disorders as much as $1,966.50 in gift cards and vouchers to follow its treatment program is raising questions about the use of financial incentives with patients.

Law professors and attorneys said this appears to be the first time that pandemic-related laws have been challenged in court over an alleged infringement on tribal sovereignty.

Montana is signaling it might step away from an innovative way of setting the prices its public employee health plan pays hospitals for services, an approach that has saved the state millions of dollars and become a model for health plans nationwide.

More than two years into the pandemic, hospital budgets are beginning to crack. One of the biggest drivers of financial shortfalls has been the cost to find workers.

The pandemic laid bare the gaps and disparities in the U.S. public health system, and often resulted in blowback against local officials trying to slow the coronavirus’s spread. But one positive outcome, in part fueled by a boost in federal dollars, is that health workers have started adapting lessons they learned from their COVID-19 response to other aspects of their work.

A new Montana law that prohibits employers from requiring COVID-19 vaccinations has hospital leaders worried, as concerns over hospital staffing and the spread of the delta variant grows.

Linda Heim knew her dad didn’t plan to wait for the cancer to kill him. For decades, he’d lived in Montana, which they’d thought was one of the few...

Montana’s pick for health director has garnered both praise and criticism for his past in Kentucky, where he sought to add work requirements to the state’s Medicaid program and was a top health official amid a hepatitis A outbreak.