Health Law Advisor

On October 26, 2015, the Federal Trade Commission ("FTC") and the Antitrust Division of the U.S. Department of Justice ("DOJ") (collectively the "Agencies") issued a joint statement to the Virginia Certificate of Public Need ("COPN") Work Group encouraging the Work Group and the Virginia General Assembly to repeal or restrict the state's certificate of need process.  The Virginia COPN Work Group was tasked by the Virginia General Assembly to review the current COPN process and recommend any changes that should be made to it.

Thirty-six states currently maintain some form of ...

Our colleague Joshua A. Stein has a Retail Labor and Employment Law Blog post that will be of interest to many of our health industry readers: “Defending Against Website Accessibility Claims: Recent Decisions Suggest the Primary Jurisdiction Doctrine Is Unlikely to Serve As Businesses’ Silver Bullet.”

Following is an excerpt:

For businesses hoping to identify an avenue to quickly and definitively defeat the recent deluge of website accessibility claims brought by industrious plaintiff’s firms, advocacy groups, and government regulators in the initial stages of ...

[caption id="attachment_1416" align="alignright" width="113"] Stuart Gerson[/caption]

Today, the U.S. Supreme Court decided (6-2, with Kennedy writing for the majority and  Ginsburg and Sotomayor dissenting) the case of Gobeille v. Liberty Mutual Insurance Co.  The matter before the Court involved Vermont law requiring certain entities, including health insurers, to report payments relating to health care claims and other information relating to health care services to a state agency for compilation in an all-inclusive health care database. 

In an important victory ...

As you all know, the subject of telehealth reimbursement continues to vex the community. For example, Medicare lags far behind.  According to the Center for Telehealth and eHealth Law, Medicare reimbursed approximately $14 million total under its telehealth benefit for 2014.  This represents less than .0025 percent of the total Medicare reimbursed for services that year.  Medicaid is something of a mixed bag with the vast majority of states providing some coverage for telehealth, but many lagging in coverage and reimbursement for store-and-forward services and remote patient ...

With the untimely passing of Supreme Court Justice Antonin Scalia, perhaps the best known and most controversial Justice on the Court, commentators, including this one, have been called upon to assess his legacy – both immediate and long term – in various areas of the law.

Justice Scalia was not known primarily as an antitrust judge and scholar. Indeed, in his confirmation hearing for the Court, he joked about what he saw as the incoherent nature of much of antitrust analysis. What he was best known for, of course, is his method of analysis of statutes and the Constitution: a literal ...

Our colleague Laura A. Stutz has a Retail Employment Law Blog post that will be of interest to many of our health industry readers: “EEOC Implements Nationwide Program to Disclose Employer Position Statements and Supporting Documents.”

Following is an excerpt:

The Equal Employment Opportunity Commission (“EEOC”) recently implemented nationwide procedures for the release of employer position statements to Charging Parties upon request. The new procedures raise concerns about disclosure by the EEOC of non-public personnel and commercial or financial information ...

Our colleague Nancy L. Gunzenhauser has a Technology Employment Law blog post that will be of interest to many of our health industry readers: “Three States Seek to Bolster Fair Pay Laws.”

Following is an excerpt:

Following on the tails of recent updates in New York and California’s equal pay laws, New Jersey, Massachusetts, and California all have bills pending in their state legislatures that would seek to eliminate pay differentials on the basis of sex and other protected categories. …

While states are leading the charge with updates to equal pay laws, the EEOC is also ...

In its Fiscal Year 2017 Private Insurance Legislative Proposals, President Obama's Budget contains a provision seeking to "eliminate surprise out-of-network healthcare charges for privately insured patients." Described as an attempt to "promote transparency on price, cost, and billing for consumers," this measure requires hospitals and physicians to collaborate so that patients receiving treatment at in‐network facilities do not face unexpected charges from out‐of‐network practitioners. This provision could have far-reaching effects, potentially impacting ...

Our colleague Frank C. Morris, Jr., a Member of the Firm in the Litigation and Employee Benefits practices, in the firm’s Washington, DC, office, was quoted in “Retaliation, ADA Charges Rise” by Allen Smith.  The article discusses the uptick in retaliation charges which have been filed and includes tips for employers on how to reduce the likelihood that they will get hit with those types of charges.

Following is an excerpt:

ADA cases today are more often about what took place in the interactive process for identifying a reasonable accommodation than about whether a disability is ...

In February 2012, two years after the passage of the Affordable Care Act ("ACA"), the Centers for Medicare & Medicaid Services ("CMS") issued a proposed rule, which was subject to significant public comment, concerning reporting and returning certain Medicare overpayments ("Proposed Rule"). On February 12, 2016, four years from the issuance of the Proposed Rule (and six years after passage of the ACA), CMS issued the final rule, which becomes effective on March 14, 2016 ("A and B Final Rule").

The A and B Final Rule applies only to providers and suppliers under Medicare Parts A and B ...