Health Law Alert

The OIG recently issued an advisory opinion permitting an excluded individual to be employed to market medications to pharmacies that participate in Medicare and Medicaid. Advisory opinions are limited to the specific individuals and facts addressed, so the decision cannot be read as general policy. It does, however, mark a […]

CMS has long taken the position that payments to hospitals under the Medicaid Disproportionate-Share Hospital program (“DSH”) should be reduced to take into account any reimbursement from the Medicare program or third-party insurers for treatment of Medicaid beneficiaries. In February, the U.S. District Court for the Western District of Missouri […]

In two recent memoranda issued by the United States Department of Justice (“DOJ”), the agency signaled an approach favorable to hospitals and other providers. The DOJ stated in one memorandum that reliance on agency guidance documents in affirmative civil enforcement cases, such as the False Claims Act (‘FCA”), needed to […]

The Bipartisan Budget Act was signed into law by President Trump on February 9, 2018. While there are several health care features in the Act, this article focuses on two important changes: Stark In 2015, CMS included commentary in its Stark update that has helped avoid inadvertent violations of Stark. […]

Hopefully by now, most employers either have conducted, or have scheduled, workplace harassment training to discuss (and prevent) harassment issues in the workplace. The impetus to refresh this training was outlined in our December newsletter article, which you can access here. The scary thing about harassment issues is that they […]