By: Heather Miller

Today's healthcare world is replete with mergers and acquisitions, hospitals buying up physician practices and surgery centers, and other organizations expanding rapidly.  In this environment it can be critical for businesses to protect their services and products from unfair competition.  Well-drafted non-compete agreements can save an entity a lot of time, money and business goodwill. 

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By: Stephen Siegel

There is no question that the "good old days" of healthcare reimbursement are gone, if they ever existed. When the Medicare program was initially implemented, physicians and suppliers were paid under Part B on a fee-for-service basis, based on the "usual and customary" charge in the market ("UCR"). Today, physicians are subject to the annual exercise known as the "Physician Fee Schedule" update. Congress acted to restrict physician reimbursement in a number of other ways, most infamously, through the attempted imposition of the Sustainable Growth Rate ("SGR").

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By: Nichole Geary

On April 14, 2015 the U.S. Senate passed legislation changing the way physicians are reimbursed under Medicare, which was signed into law by President Obama a few days later. The long awaited new law, referred to as the "doc fix bill," finally repeals the Sustainable Growth Rate (the "SGR") method for calculating physician fees under Medicare, which had been in place since 1997. The new payment method not only eliminates the tie of physician fees to economic growth under the SGR (which for over ten years would have resulted in a negative adjustment to the fee schedule- but for a series of temporary legislative patches), but also accelerates the move from a traditional fee for service model to a value based payment program with the introduction of the Merit-Based Incentive Payment System ("MIPS").

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