The Centers for Medicare and Medicaid Services (“CMS”) has included proposed changes to the implementing regulations for the Physician Payments Sunshine Act (“Sunshine Act”) as part of its proposed 2020 Physician Fee Schedule. The proposed regulatory changes fundamentally expand the scope of the Sunshine Act and will require reporting entities to make substantial updates to their payment tracking policies and procedures. Entities that are required to report payment data under the Sunshine Act should review the proposed rules, submit comments, and evaluate how these proposals will affect future financial relationships with health care providers on a going-forward basis.

CMS is accepting comments on the proposed rule until September 27, 2019. If finalized, the regulatory changes to be promulgated in 42 C.F.R. Part 403 would be effective for data collected during calendar year 2021 that must be reported by March 31, 2022 .Continue Reading Sunshine Act/Open Payments Regulatory Changes in the 2020 Physician Fee Schedule

Nearly 20,000 comments have been submitted in response to the Department of Health and Human Services January 31, 2019 notice of proposed rulemaking eliminating discount safe harbor protection for reductions in price to prescription pharmaceutical products (or rebates) provided by manufacturers to plan sponsors under Medicare Part D and Medicaid managed care organizations (MCOs), whether negotiated by the plan or by pharmacy benefit managers (PBM) or paid through a PBM to the plan or Medicaid MCO. Most of the comments appear to be relatively short, text box comments submitted by individuals through patient or business advocacy groups.  The following is a very high level summary of the several hundred comments posted (so far) from health plans, manufacturers, pharmacies, their respective associations, and policy oriented groups:
Continue Reading Highlights from the Comments on the Proposed Elimination of Discount Safe Harbors for Rebates

On Nov. 29, 2018, Deputy Attorney General Rod J. Rosenstein announced several amendments to policies on individual accountability set forth in the 2015 Yates Memo. As a result, companies facing FCA actions—especially defendants in health care cases—should consider following three strategy tips:  (1) Establish clear benchmarks for cooperation.  (2) Advocate for individual releases.  And (3)

In its recent notice of proposed rulemaking setting policy for Medicare Advantage (MA) and the Prescription Drug Program (PDP) for calendar year 2020, CMS announced that it would establish extrapolation as a method to be used in risk adjustment validation (RADV) audits, and further, that it would not make any adjustments to account for errors in Medicare fee for service data in determining recovery amounts.

CMS uses a risk adjustment process to modify MA plan payments to better reflect the relative risk of each plan’s enrollees. Payments to each MA plan are adjusted based on risk scores that reflect enrollees’ health status (categorized into Hierarchical Condition Categories (HCCs)) and demographic characteristics derived from member claims data. To counteract incentives that a plan might have to over-report enrollee diagnoses, CMS emphasizes that all diagnoses submitted to enhance risk must be documented in a medical record, and uses RADV audits to ensure that medical record documentation exists, and thus, that payments to MAOs accurately reflect the level of risk assumed.
Continue Reading CMS Announces and Solicits Comments on Expanded RADV Audit Methodology

On November 1, 2018, the Centers for Medicare & Medicaid Services (“CMS”) filed the pre-publication version of the CY 2019 Physician Fee Schedule Final Rule (“2019 PFS Final Rule”). Within this massive publication, CMS finalized two regulatory changes affecting the exceptions at 42 CFR § 411.357 to the Physician Self-Referral Law (also known as the “Stark Law”) for compensation arrangements. The 2019 PFS Final Rule reconciles the regulations with the statutory changes made to the Stark Law enacted by the Bipartisan Budget Act of 2018 (“2018 BBA”) with respect to (1) how arrangements may fulfill the “writing” requirement under the compensation exception and (2) how arrangements that initially proceed without a signed agreement may still meet the signature requirement of an applicable exception. Parties to financial arrangements in effect on or after February 9, 2018 that implicate the Stark Law may rely upon these new modifications.

The Stark Law generally prohibits a physician from making a referral of designated health services (“DHS”) to an entity with which he or she (or an immediate family member) has a financial relationship. Section 411.357 details several excepted compensation arrangements carved out from the “financial relationship” definition for the purposes of the Stark Law. These exceptions include arrangements for the rental of office space and equipment, bona fide employment relationships, group practice arrangements with hospitals, certain fair-market-value compensation arrangements, among others.
Continue Reading 2019 Physician Fee Schedule Rule Modifies Stark Regulations to Reflect Statutory Changes

On October 3rd, the United States Senate passed a bipartisan opioids package with a sweeping vote of 98 to 1, after the U.S. House of Representatives passed the final version of the bill with a vote of 393 to 8. One of its components, the “Fighting the Opioid Epidemic with Sunshine Act,” expands the scope

Federal agencies are signaling closer oversight of Medicaid managed care organizations (“MCOs”). On August 21, 2018, the U.S. Comptroller General Gene Dodaro and Centers for Medicare and Medicaid Services (“CMS”) Administrator Seema Verma testified to the Senate Homeland Security and Governmental Affairs Committee about combating Medicaid fraud and urged additional oversight of Medicaid MCOs and a larger restructuring of the Medicaid program. This testimony follows other steps taken by the Governmental Accountability Office (“GAO”) and CMS earlier this year to encourage increased scrutiny of Medicaid managed care programs.
Continue Reading GAO and CMS Seek Increased Scrutiny on Medicaid Managed Care Organizations