Congress remains in session this week on Capitol Hill. Here’s a link to the Week in Congress’s report on last week activities on the Hill as well as a Congressional Budget Office report on the federal deficit.

Modern Healthcare reports on a southern California hospital system that “requir[es] in-hospital physician groups to contract with the same insurance carriers as ” the hospital system does. Angry patients cause hospitals to implement the requirement, which prevents surprise bills for patients. That’s a much more practical solution than passing a bunch of complicated laws.

Last week, the Wall Street Journal reported that

The birthrate in America has been declining, but some places are more fertile than others, according to a new look at federal data that reveals significant variation in fertility rates around the country. Only South Dakota’s and Utah’s fertility rates reached the level needed to sustain the current population.

The number of babies born in 2017, around 3.85 million, was the lowest since 1987. In order for the country’s population to essentially replace itself, researchers say that 2,100 babies should be born for every 1,000 women. In 2017, the total fertility rate—an estimate of the total number of children a woman will eventually have in her lifetime—was 1,765 births per 1,000 women, well below what is known as the replacement level.

Hispanic women had the highest fertility rate of the ethnicities studied, and passed the 2,100 births per 1,000 women needed to sustain the population in 29 states. Black women reached that level in 12 states, while white women didn’t reach that level in any state.

Kenneth M. Johnson, senior demographer at the University of New Hampshire who wasn’t involved in the study, said that the data paints a more-nuanced understanding of fertility patterns that can help identify challenges for particular regions, such as potential labor-force shortages and challenges caring for an aging population. Low birthrates could disrupt the economy as the country’s population ages out of the workforce, though researchers say those effects could be offset by factors such as immigration.