Richard H. Hughes, IV, Member of the Firm in the Health Care & Life Sciences practice, in the firm’s Washington, DC, office, was quoted in CBS News Health Watch, in “Insurance Wouldn’t Pay for His Vasectomy. Such Birth Control Coverage May Become More Elusive.” The article was written by Sam Whitehead, correspondent with KFF Health News.
Following is an excerpt:
Engler's experience highlights how a labyrinthine patchwork of insurance coverage rules on reproductive health care creates confusion for patients. Oregon requires that vasectomies be covered for most people who work in the public sector. But the federal Affordable Care Act — which mandates that most health plans cover preventive health services, such as contraception, at no cost to the consumer — does not require vasectomies to be covered.
And that perplexity surrounding coverage may get more complicated. …
The job of defining which contraceptive services should be covered falls to the Health Resources and Services Administration, or HRSA. Two other groups — the U.S. Preventive Services Task Force, or USPSTF, and the Advisory Committee on Immunization Practices, or ACIP — make recommendations on other kinds of care that the ACA requires insurers to cover. …
What power agencies do have is likely to be curtailed in the wake of a June 28 U.S. Supreme Court decision that overturned a decades-old precedent dictating that courts should defer to federal agencies when it comes to regulatory or scientific decisions.
"Courts are going to be more able to scrutinize experts," said Richard Hughes, a health care regulatory attorney with the firm Epstein, Becker, and Green. "It's a vibe shift — we're moving in the direction of the administrative state being curtailed."
