David E. Matyas, Member of the Firm in the Health Care & Life Sciences practice, in the firm’s Washington, DC, office, was quoted in Law360, in “Health Care Policy Moves to Watch in 2019,” by Jeff Overley. (Read the full version – subscription required.)
Following is an excerpt:
Health care providers and insurers in 2019 will confront an eye-popping array of regulatory endeavors, including a new “blacklist” that shames accused fraudsters, an expansion of kickback liability, and potentially dramatic changes to Medicare reimbursement. Here, Law360 explains health policy developments that lawyers need to track in the year ahead. …
Leeway Looms for AKS, Stark Law
In 2019, health care providers may finally make progress on their long-standing requests for more leeway under the AKS, which restricts financial incentives intended to generate patient referrals, and the Stark Law, which restricts doctors from “self-referring” patients to entities in which they have financial interests.
The HHS OIG in August sought ideas for kickback safe harbors to support coordinated care among different providers, and it received more than 350 responses. CMS in June asked how it could modify the Stark Law to advance coordinated care, and it received almost 400 responses. …
Attorneys caution, however, that observers shouldn’t set their hopes too high, predicting that any new wiggle room will likely be fairly narrow.
“Some authors have been discussing ... that the government is looking to ‘loosen’ the standards. That is not the case,” David Matyas, an Epstein Becker Green member, told Law360. “It is that the government is trying to determine how these laws need to be applied under these payment schemes.”
People
Board of Directors / Member of the Firm
