Health Care

In a previous blog post, we began to dissect the new Massachusetts State Senate bill, “An Act Furthering Health Empowerment and Affordability by Leveraging Transformative Health Care,” and focused on a provision that would ban hospitals from billing payors for many common outpatient hospital services.  In this second of a multipart series, we review how…… Continue reading this entry

In a striking blow to 340B hospitals, the Department of Health and Human Services, Centers for Medicare and Medicaid Services (CMS) released a final Medicare Outpatient Prospective Payment System (OPPS) rule adopting its earlier proposal to significantly reduce Medicare reimbursement for separately payable outpatient drugs purchased by hospitals under the 340B program.  The final rule…… Continue reading this entry

On November 2, 2017, the “Tax Cuts and Jobs Act” was introduced in the House of Representatives. This act has immediate and far-reaching implications for tax-exempt finance. Among other things, the Tax Cuts and Jobs Act would: Repeal the authority to issue “qualified private activity bonds” after December 31, 2017. These bonds generally include all…… Continue reading this entry

For the second year in a row, Foley & Lardner LLP was named the Outstanding Committee Sponsor of the Year Award by the Association of Corporate Counsel (ACC) for Foley’s work on behalf of the ACC’s national Health Law Committee. Attorneys Alan Einhorn and Jana Anderson, Foley’s liaisons to the Health Law Committee, were presented…… Continue reading this entry

In some states, including the Commonwealth of Massachusetts, “site neutrality” for outpatient hospital reimbursement is factoring into state-specific health reform and cost containment initiatives. This potentially goes well-beyond Medicare’s limitation of reimbursement at new off-campus outpatient hospital departments under Section 603 of the Bi-partisan Budget Act of 2015. Since Massachusetts’ state health reform law was…… Continue reading this entry

Efforts to replace the Affordable Care Act (ACA) with the Graham-Cassidy legislation were unsuccessful as lawmakers rushed to meet the September 30th deadline when the Senate would have lost its current reconciliation vehicle.  Changes to the bill were incorporated in order to gain Republican support from a number of holdouts, but with Senator Susan Collins…… Continue reading this entry

Summary of AHA v. Price, 2017 U.S. App. LEXIS 14887 (D.C. Cir. Aug. 11, 2017)   On August 11, 2017, the D.C. Circuit reversed the district court and held that the district court abused its discretion by ordering the Secretary of HHS to clear the backlog of administrative appeals of denied Medicare reimbursement claims within…… Continue reading this entry

Alaska’s Department of Commerce, Community, and Economic Development has finalized new regulations to create a special Telemedicine Business Registry for health care providers delivering telemedicine services in the Frontier State. The regulations in Title 12, Chapter 02 of the Alaska Administrative Code were effective on April 28, 2017 and implement provisions of Alaska SB 74…… Continue reading this entry

New Jersey has a new telemedicine law, recently signed by Governor Chris Christie. The law cements the validity of telehealth services in the Garden State, establishes telemedicine practice standards, and imposes telehealth coverage requirements for New Jersey Medicaid, Medicaid managed care, commercial health plans, and other State-funded health insurance. After a year of debate in…… Continue reading this entry