Health Advisory: Medicaid Drug Rebate Law Celebrates First Decade as Federal Prosecutors Provide First Close Look at Implementation
12/1/2000
This advisory discusses the Medicaid rebate law, which has now been in existence for ten years. Designed to give the state Medicaid programs the benefit of the lower drug prices associated with volume purchasing, and it has spawned about a dozen copycat state rebate laws. Until now, state and federal oversight has been sparse; this situation may be coming to an end however. The Office of the Inspector General of the Department of Health and Human Services (OIG) said that the federal government would be scrutinizing rebate reporting by companies as part of an overall pharmaceutical reimbursement enforcement initiative. This article examines the implications and focus of the government's initiative. This advisory also discusses an amendment to OSHA's bloodborne pathogen standard. The Needlestick Safety and Prevention program, recently signed into law, is designed to reduce the incidence of needle-stick injuries among health care workers.
