Health Care

Late last week, the Department of Justice (DOJ) announced that in FY2015 it obtained more than $3.5 billion in settlements and judgments from civil cases involving allegations of false claims against the government.

Experienced practitioners are anecdotally aware of the growth in recent years in the volume of health care qui tam litigation. That perceived trend is validated quite graphically in the most recent Department of Justice (“DOJ”) statistics on False Claims Act filings.

Last week, under the cover of the impending Thanksgiving Holiday, OIG lobbed another grenade at the 340B Drug Discount Program. The means of delivery was an OIG Report on Medicare Part B payments for 340B drugs.

This week’s ML Strategies Health Care Update highlights the recent Department of Health and Human Services (HHS) forum on prescription drug costs, which featured players from every corner of the industry, including top government officials.

Last Tuesday, Dr. Jeffrey Shuren, director of the Food and Drug Administration’s Center for Devices and Radiological Health, announced at a hearing before the House Energy and Commerce Committee’s Subcommittee on Health that FDA would move forward with finalizing its plan to regulate laboratory developed tests (LDTs) sometime in 2016.

Last week, pharmacy benefit manager (PBM) and independent pharmacy representatives provided testimony to the House Judiciary Subcommittee on Regulatory Reform, Commercial and Antitrust Law in a congressional hearing examining the state of competition in the pharmacy and PBM marketplace.

On Tuesday, ML Strategies (MLS) posted its weekly Health Care Update, which provides information from the previous week on a variety of important health-care-related topics.

On November 16, 2015, the Centers for Medicare and Medicaid Services (“CMS”) published the most significant changes to the physician self-referral law ("Stark Law" or "Stark") regulations since 2008.

In recent years, the Food and Drug Administration has been struggling with how to adapt the regulatory paradigm for in vitro diagnostic devices (IVDs) – any test that detects a disease, condition, or infection – to the rapidly developing world of genetic and genomic testing services.

On November 12th and 13th, the Food and Drug Administration hosted genome scientists from across the nation at its campus in White Oak, Maryland.

Last week the Federal Trade Commission (“FTC” or “Commission”) issued an administrative complaint challenging the merger of two West Virginia hospitals that had earlier been cleared by the state’s Attorney General (“W.V. AG”) following the entry of two agreements between the hospitals and the W.V. AG (“Agreements”).

The Federal Trade Commission (“FTC”) yesterday concluded its antitrust review of  Mylan N.V.’s (“Mylan”)  proposed acquisition of Perrigo Company plc (“Perrigo”) by entering into a proposed consent judgment that would require Mylan to divest seven generic products, including three future pipeline products, to Alvogen Group Inc. (“Alvogen”).

On October 29th, 2015, the Centers for Medicare and Medicaid Services ("CMS") issued its final rule ("Final Rule") for waivers of fraud and abuse laws in the context of the Medicare Shared Savings Program ("Shared Savings Program").

The Federal Trade Commission (FTC) last week disputed the effectiveness and competitive impact of the Food and Drug Administration’s recently proposed biosimilar naming policy and argued that using different nonproprietary names for biosimilars as compared to their reference biologics would signal clinically meaningful differences to already-confused physicians.

In a recent Alert, the Mintz Levin Health Law Practice and ML Strategies provided a comprehensive look at recent developments in Massachusetts health policy. In addition to a detailed report on recent Health Policy Commission (HPC) activities, the Alert highlights pending legislation that will affect the health industry.