Health Law Scan

The old adage—March comes in like a lion and goes out like a lamb—didn’t quite hold true for the hospice sector, which experienced a late-month flurry of activity. The government gave the hospice sector a lot to consider, from MedPAC’s suggested freeze on hospice rates to CMS’s 2025 Proposed Hospice Rule (public comments due May 28, 2024) that, if finalized as is, would include a 2.6% payment bump. CMS’s Proposed Hospice Rule lays the groundwork for the long-anticipated Hospice Outcomes and Patient Evaluation (HOPE) quality measures data collection instrument, which will be used to collect data at various points during the hospice stay, not just at admission and discharge.

Insight from our antitrust team was recently featured in an article for the American Health Lawyers Association’s Journal of Health and Life Sciences Law.

Partner Reece Hirsch recently attended and spoke at the 2020 Health Datapalooza held in Washington, DC.

In this LawFlash, our antitrust and competition team details increased jurisdictional and filing fee thresholds under the Hart-Scott-Rodino Act announced by the Federal Trade Commission (FTC) on January 28.

The US Department of Justice (DOJ) Antitrust Division issued a Business Review Letter (BRL) on January 15 in response to a proposal by the American Optometric Association (AOA) and AOAExcel GPO, LLC to expand their group purchasing arrangement.

The FTC announced on October 21, 2019, that its Commissioners voted 5–0 in support of issuing orders requesting information from five health insurance companies and two health systems to study the effects of Certificate of Public Advantage laws (COPAs) on price, quality, access, and innovation in the healthcare sector.