Ohio lawmakers moved quickly Wednesday to pass a bill setting training and certification requirements for a new group of professionals who will help guide consumers through the new health insurance exchange.

Gov. John Kasich signed a package of bills Wednesday aimed at shoring up Ohio's five public pension funds and praised the rare bipartisanship that secured their passage.

A package of bills aimed at shoring up Ohio's five public pension funds cleared the state Legislature, in a rare showing of bipartisanship during an election year.

In a dispute over the scoring of contract applications, a central Ohio judge on Tuesday blocked the state from moving forward with tentative Medicaid contracts it awarded to five health plans.

Ohio officials dropped two managed care organizations Thursday that had been tentatively awarded new Medicaid contracts and picked two other plans after weeks of legal review and further examination over how each application was scored.

Ohio wants to take a complicated and lengthy process used to assess the Medicaid eligibility of more than 700,000 people and simplify it based on income, according to a draft of the plans released on Wednesday.

A bill imposing the most stringent abortion limit in the nation has been put on hold in Ohio after backers who had defended its constitutionality for almost a year asked for a pile of last-minute language changes.

Ohio's largest state employee union reached a tentative deal with state officials on Wednesday to extend its current contract until 2015, the first bargaining agreement following the defeat of the state's contentious union law.