After a year working on various projects, mostly for the senator, Alex has been promoted to a senior analyst in the Economic Consulting wing of Kurana Consulting. Happy Hearts hospital, one of the best and largest providers of cardiac surgeries and other related treatments in the US, has contacted Alex's firm asking for help in their negotiations with the Centers for Medicare and Medicaid Services (CMS). CMS has been looking at the prices they pay for certain heart disease treatments, and they are not happy with the trends. The payments are "bundled," meaning CMS is paying for the entire treatment episode of a patient, and those bundled payments have increased by 30% to 50% in the past 10 years. CMS would like to renegotiate prices, but Happy Hearts thinks the rise in prices is justifiable because they have been using the more modern and higher efficiency treatments. They also believe that patients have experienced much better survival rates and much lower re-hospitalization rates. For her first project as a lead analyst, Alex has been asked to prepare some content for a big presentation with the Happy Hearts team.

Help out Alex by writing a brief essay that includes the following:

• Consideration of the problem
• The right data
• How to conduct the analysis
• How to present the results to Happy Hearts and based on the findings develop arguments to be presented to CMS during the next round of negotiations.