Our healthcare team recently published a LawFlash covering President Joe Biden’s two new health-focused executive actions, the Strengthening Medicaid and the Affordable Care Act and the Protecting Women’s Health at Home and Abroad memorandum.

In this LawFlash our Labor, Employment, and Benefits team details the long-anticipated ruling by the US Supreme Court in Bostock v. Clayton County that held Title VII’s ban on discrimination extends to gay, lesbian, and transgender individuals.

The recently passed FY 2020 Appropriations Act increases funding for US healthcare agencies and programs over FY 2019 levels.

In this LawFlash, Morgan Lewis healthcare industry partner Susan Feigin Harris analyzes the December 18, 2019, decision by the US Court of Appeals for the Fifth Circuit in Texas v. Azar and concludes that it “portends potential chaos in health insurance coverage and puts the future of the entire Patient Protection and Affordable Care Act (ACA) in limbo.”

In what has become the new “normal” in Washington, DC, these days, hospitals and their associations filed a lawsuit today against the US Secretary of Health and Human Services (Secretary) challenging the recent Final Rule issued by the Centers for Medicare and Medicaid Services (CMS) on November 27, 2019, addressing hospital pricing disclosures.

In this LawFlash, our healthcare industry team unpacks the final rule requiring hospitals to make standard charges public and the proposed transparency in coverage rule requiring group health plans and health insurance issuers to disclose negotiated rates with providers and out-of-network estimates for consumers.

“Medicare for All” has appeared in the nation’s political dialogue as we head into the next election cycle, with a number of plans being proposed by Democratic lawmakers.

In a tersely worded letter to the US Court of Appeals for the Fifth Circuit, the US Department of Justice (DOJ) announced on Monday that it “has determined that the district court’s judgment in Texas v. U.S. should be affirmed” and “is not urging that any portion of the district court’s judgment be reversed.”

The 116th Congress convened on January 3 with Democrats controlling the House for the first time since 2011 and Republicans maintaining their majority in the Senate. Divided government typically constrains Congress’s ability to pass broad, new legislative initiatives, while also limiting the scope of the legislation that does pass. Healthcare policy, especially, has been a point of partisan contention in the past.

In an opinion released on a Friday evening in mid-December, Judge Reed O’Connor of the US District Court for the Northern District of Texas reignited the simmering debate over the Affordable Care Act’s (ACA’s) ultimate survival.