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Medicaid & the Law

Legal, regulatory and strategic advice regarding America's largest health insurance payer, and one of the most complicated and least understood areas of healthcare law.

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After Long Wait, HHS Announces Medicaid CARES Act Allocation
Blog June 09, 2020
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…
Massachusetts Medicaid Proposes Changes to Hospital Acquisition of Costly Prescription Drugs
Blog December 10, 2019
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…
CMS Medicaid Fiscal Accountability Regulation Published
Blog November 15, 2019
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…
D.C. Circuit Reverses District Court in DSH Case
Blog August 16, 2019
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…
Senate Finance Committee Issues Report on Medicaid Supplemental Payments
Blog May 17, 2019
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…
Court Case Involving Massachusetts Health Care Law Shows Relationship Between Medicare Payments and Medicaid
Blog December 03, 2018
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…
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Blog Editors

About Our Blog

Foley Hoag has a unique team of healthcare lawyers and specialists with decades of experience in statutory and regulatory analysis, compliance, government investigations, litigation and corporate transactions. Most of our lawyers and healthcare policy specialists have had a direct hand in shaping virtually every healthcare law and regulation enacted over the past four decades, including:

  • The Patient Protection and Affordable Care Act of 2010
  • The Medicare Modernization Act of 2003
  • The Food and Drug Administration Modernization Act of 1997
  • The Balanced Budget Act of 1997
  • The Health Insurance Portability and Accountability Act of 1996 (HIPAA)
  • Budget reconciliation laws of the 1980s

Medicaid is also, by far, the largest health insurance payer in the United States and has even surpassed Medicare in terms of the number of enrollees. Medicaid is a crucial component in America’s health care system.


Our focus includes:

  • Medicaid coverage and reimbursement issues for innovative pharmaceutical products
  • Legal, regulatory and strategic advice for Medicaid mental health providers and payers
  • Medicaid waivers
  • State coverage of the Medicaid expansion population
  • State-specific Medicaid issues
  • Medicaid financing
  • Medicaid and long-term care

Blog Editors