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In November of last year, we wrote about a preliminary injunction being sought by hospital advocacy groups attempting to stop implementation of the Trump administration’s cuts to the 340B Drug Pricing Program (“340B Program”). Last week, the Motion for a Preliminary Injunction was denied and the case was dismissed in a final, appealable order. As a result, the final rule effecting such cuts – “Medicare Program: Hospital Outpatient Prospective Payment and Ambulatory Surgical Center Payment Systems and Quality Reporting Programs” (“Final Rule”), promulgated by the Centers for Medicare & Medicaid Services (CMS) on November 13, 2017 – went into effect on January 1, 2018.
Continue Reading 340B Drug Pricing Program Litigation Update

On November 13, 2017, the Centers for Medicare & Medicaid Services (CMS) issued the final rule, “Medicare Program: Hospital Outpatient Prospective Payment and Ambulatory Surgical Center Payment Systems and Quality Reporting Programs” (“Final Rule”). The Final Rule, in addition to the usual collection of annual Medicare payment updates and adjustments for the coming year, includes provisions that substantially lower reimbursements for hospitals that purchase prescription medications under the 340B Drug Pricing Program (the “340B Program”).
Continue Reading The 340B Drug Pricing Program: New CMS Final Rule Draws a Motion for Preliminary Injunction from Hospital Groups

The fifth Open Enrollment period under the Affordable Care Act (ACA) started on November 1st, and will continue for a scant 45 days ending on December 15, 2017. This year, not only has the Open Enrollment been cut in half, but obstacles abound – obstacles that were not part of the 2016 Open Enrollment Period. For example:

  • Healthcare.gov is undergoing maintenance that could interfere with access during the Open Enrollment Period;
  • Federal support for Open Enrollment outreach and advertising is substantially lower this year than it has been in prior Open Enrollment periods; and
  • The number of health insurers participating in the exchanges has dropped significantly from last year (prompted in part by well-founded concerns regarding the future of federal cost-sharing reduction (CSR) payments), and in some counties, only one plan is available to individuals and families seeking coverage through the exchanges.

Continue Reading Clean Up on Aisle 12! The Obamacare Pop-Up Store is Open but Stocks are Limited

Yesterday, Thursday, October 12th, on the heels of the recent and repeated failures to repeal and replace the Affordable Care Act (“ACA”), President Donald Trump signed an executive order nominally aimed at increasing competition in the healthcare marketplace, but widely believed to be driven by a desire to undermine the ACA. The executive order broadly tasks the Labor Department with changing the current policies on the accessibility of certain healthcare plans. The coming policy changes are speculated to expand the market for healthcare plans that are exempt from many of the regulations under the ACA. Such healthcare plans are known as Association Health Plans (“AHPs”).
Continue Reading Trump Administration Takes Aim at ACA With AHP Executive Order

While congressional Republicans spent much of September pushing for passage of the Graham-Cassidy “repeal and replace” bill, other time-sensitive legislative tasks were left to languish, including a September 30 deadline to reauthorize funding for the Children’s Health Insurance Program (“CHIP”) that has since come and gone. The failure to timely reauthorize the program has put the fate of CHIP in limbo, at least in the short term.
Continue Reading Nine Days and Counting – The Fate of CHIP Remains Uncertain Amid Congressional Deadlock

In a proposed rule published Tuesday, August 15, 2017, the Centers for Medicare & Medicaid Services (CMS) announced its intention to roll back a handful of payment models introduced under the Obama Administration. If implemented, the rule would cancel the Episode Payment Models (EPMs) and Cardiac Rehabilitation (CR) Incentive Payment Model, each currently set to begin next year. The rule would also cut the number of mandatory participation locations in the Comprehensive Care for Joint Replacement (CJR) Model from 67 to 34.
Continue Reading CMS Aims to Nix Obama-Era Payment Models

The Future of CSRs – A Tale Told in Tweets. In follow-up to our May 5, 2017 blog post, “ACA Cost-Sharing Reductions: An Uncertain Future,” on August 16, 2017, the Trump Administration made an announcement (Announcement) that it will continue to fund cost-sharing reduction (CSR) payments to insurers in accordance with the CSR provisions in the Affordable Care Act (ACA) for the month of August. The Announcement did not include any commitments to fund CSR payments in September or anytime thereafter.
Continue Reading ACA Cost-Sharing Reductions– A Momentary Reprieve and Ongoing Doubts

In Parts I-III of our blog series, Very Opaque to Slightly Transparent: Shedding Light on the Future of Healthcare, we considered the healthcare landscape before implementation of the Affordable Care Act (ACA), and explored potential market outcomes under partial repeal and potential “repeal and replace” scenarios.  Although we are just a couple weeks into the Trump Presidency, we have already seen a number of ACA-related developments.
Continue Reading Part V: The ACA, Post-Inauguration

One thing that has become clear since the election of Donald Trump last week is that efforts to repeal or amend the Affordable Care Act (ACA) will be a high priority legislative item for next year’s Congress and the incoming Administration. But to have a better grasp of what the future of health care might look like under the Trump Administration, it is important to understand how the current healthcare landscape came to be. This first post in our blog series, Very Opaque to Slightly Transparent: Shedding Light on the Future of Healthcare, takes us on a brief stroll down memory lane of how and why the ACA became enacted, and how it has helped lead to the developments and trends we have seen in the healthcare industry.
Continue Reading Part I: How We Got Here: President Obama to Obamacare to President-elect Trump

In a November 14, 2016 Forbes article entitled, “Under Trump, Americans Can Finally Put ObamaCare Behind Us,” Sally Pipes wrote, “ObamaCare in a full-on ‘death spiral,’ voters were clearly in no mood for Clinton’s plan to ‘build on’ the president’s healthcare law. Instead, they chose a president who has said that his first order of business following President Trump’s inauguration on January 20, will be to ‘ask Congress to immediately deliver a full repeal of ObamaCare.’”  Notwithstanding Ms. Pipes confidence in a full repeal, in a Wall Street Journal article dated November 11, 2016, “Donald Trump, in Exclusive Interview, Tells WSJ He Is Willing to Keep Parts of Obama Health Law” by Monica Langley and Gerard Baker, Mr. President-elect Donald Trump said that he favors keeping the ObamaCare provisions which prohibit insurers from denying coverage because of existing conditions and which allows parents to provide additional years of  coverage for children on their insurance policies.  “I like those very much,” Mr. Trump is reported as saying.
Continue Reading Very Opaque to Slightly Transparent: Shedding Light on the Future of Healthcare