Category Archives: DSH

Well, we’ve been waiting for awhile and now it’s been made public:  the Department of Health and Human Services (HHS) announced on June 9 that it was releasing $25 billion in funding from the Coronavirus Aid, Relief and Economic Security (CARES) Act to high Medicaid providers and to safety net hospitals.  President Trump signed the CARES Act into law on March 27; the CARES law and a subsequent law appropriated $175 billion to a Provider Relief Fund to address the needs of healthcare providers that had increased expenses or lost revenues due to COVID-19. … More

Earlier this year, we wrote about a lawsuit involving the 340B drug pricing program.  We sometimes write about the 340B program because  it is integrally linked to the Medicaid prescription drug rebate program.  So today, we wanted to call attention to a proposed regulation issued by the Massachusetts Medicaid program (which is called “MassHealth”) that shows that link clearly.

Section 1927 of the Social Security Act requires pharmaceutical manufacturers to provide a rebate to state Medicaid plans if they want to have their drugs covered by Medicaid. … More

Earlier this week, CMS released for publication a proposed rule that would add some degree of transparency and oversight to the somewhat opaque world of Medicaid financing.  It’s a topic that’s fascinated us here at the Medicaid and the Law Blog for some time and we’ve written about it on a couple of occasions.  Over the years, Congress and CMS (and even before there was a CMS,… More

We have long covered the handful of lawsuits that have been filed over the past several years concerning Medicaid disproportionate share hospital (“DSH”) payment policies.  These lawsuits all revolve around some steps that CMS had taken in recent years to exclude payments made for dual-eligible (Medicaid and Medicare) patients and payments made by private insurers from DSH hospitals’ uncompensated care costs.  CMS promulgated a rule to this effect,… More

The majority members of the Senate Finance Committee released a report last month that delves into the mysterious world of Medicaid supplemental payments.  We thought we’d go through it here, especially in light of some of the litigation going on across the country involving Medicaid disproportionate share (DSH) payments, a form of Medicaid supplemental payments.

The Finance Committee report found that total Medicaid supplemental payments in fiscal year 2016 totaled nearly $50 billion,… More

In 2006, former Massachusetts Governor Mitt Romney signed Chapter 58 of the Massachusetts Acts of 2006 into law.  Chapter 58 was designed to ensure that all Massachusetts residents would have access to some form of health insurance, and it accomplished this through reforms to the individual insurance market; subsidies to purchase health insurance; and an expansion of the Massachusetts Medicaid program, known as “MassHealth.”  Many observers have suggested that the enactment of Chapter 58 in Massachusetts paved the way for enactment of the Affordable Care Act at the federal level four years later (although Governor Romney strenuously denied this during his campaign for President in 2012).… More

We have posted over the past several months about some interesting Medicaid litigation across the country involving Medicaid disproportionate share (DSH) payments.  In this post, we try to explain a bit more about disproportionate share payments, how the payments work, and how the program has evolved over the past three and a half decades. As we discuss – this evolution has often been circuitous,… More