health law

Wyoming legislators have rejected the expansion of Medicaid to 20,000 low-income Wyomingites, The Wyoming Tribune Eagle's James Chilton reports. Most legislators continued their opposition to the expansion, but Sen. Tony Ross, the chairman of the Senate Appropriations Committee, changed his mind "having looked at the potential savings and compared them to the state’s massive looming budget shortfalls." However, not enough legislators changed their mind to bring Medicaid expansion to Wyoming.

Virginia Democratic Governor Terry McAuliffe once again suggested Virginia expand Medicaid in his latest budget proposal, but House Republican leaders immediately rejected the plan, the Richmond Times-Dispatch reports. The plan would have used a tax on hospital revenues to generate Virginia's share of the costs of the expansion.

An Arkansas legislative task force has backed Gov. Asa Hutchinson's efforts to get federal waivers from some rules for Medicaid, The Times Record's John Lyon reports.

Hutchinson wants waivers like requiring people with incomes of 100 to 138 percent of the federal poverty level to pay premiums and referring "unemployed, able-bodied beneficiaries" to work training before he would agree to maintain the Medicaid expansion that provides health insurance to more low-income Arkansas citizens.

The current Medicaid waiver that allows federal dollars to subsidize private health insurance is going to expire at the end of 2016.

Small-scale breaches of patients' medical privacy are going unpunished because officials at the federal office for Civil Rights focus on voluntary compliance as the remedy, ProPublica's Charles Ornstein reports. Many people also cannot turn to their own lawsuits for redress. The Health Insurance Portability and Accountability Act doesn't allow for a private cause of action, and states vary on how much protection tort law provides for medical privacy.

Indiana courts have ruled that healthcare providers are liable for employees who snoop in medical records, but courts in Ohio, Minnesota and New York, as well as other states, have rejected those types of claims, Ornstein reports.

Small-scale breaches of medical privacy can cause the most harm, Ornstein reports. For example, an employee at a New Jersey hospital disclosed that an 11-year-old boy had attempted suicde. The revelation caused him to be bullied at his school, Ornstein reports. In another example, a dental assistant had a former friend post on Facebook that she had the STD human papillomavirus.

South Dakota Republican Governor Dennis Daugaard and conservative Louisiana Democratic Governor-Elect John Bel Edwards have come out in favor of the expansion of Medicaid in their states.

JR Ball, a columnist for Nola.com | The Times-Picayune, notes that Louisiana is on track to become the second state in the Deep South to adopt Medicaid expansion. Republican legislators, who control the Louisiana Legislature, have sharply reversed course, now favoring expansion now that there is a change in guard about to take place between Governor Bobby Jindal and Governor-Elect Edwards.

In South Dakota, Daugaard has pitched a plan to expand Medicaid to 55,000 low-income residents, The Huffington Post's Jeffrey Young reports. The governor said that expansion would cost less than what South Dakota expends for health care services American Indians receive outside of the Indian Health Service.

Alabama Governor Robert Bentley, a conservative Republican, is considering the expansion of the state's Medicaid program, the Associated Press' Kim Chandler reports. Bentley, a dermatologist by training, remarked, "'I am concerned about the plight of the working poor ... If doctors are not paid for seeing those patients, doctors will not go to rural Alabama because you can't expect a doctor to go to rural Alabama and lose money."' The governor, however, said that funding the expansion would be a challenge.

There is now a circuit split over whether President Obama's administrative accommodation for charities and nonprofits--who object to the mandate that health insurance cover birth control--impinges on their religious beliefs. SCOTUSBlog's Lyle Denniston reports that the U.S. Court of Appeals for the Eighth Circuit ruled that merely notifying the government of their objection would trigger the coverage in their health insurance plans and violate their religious beliefs. But six other circuit courts have ruled in favor of the administrative process. A circuit split makes it more likely the Supreme Court will take up the case.

The nonprofits oppose the birth control mandate because they oppose abortion and some of them consider some birth-control methods to be "abortion on demand," Denniston reports.
 

Iowa is scrapping its Medicaid program because there has been a spike in premiums of around 20 percent and because just two insurance carriers have joined in, FierceHealthPayer's Dori Zweig reports. Enrollees are going to be moved into the traditional Medicaid expansion program or into Medicaid managed care.

Ohio can't deny Medicaid benefits to a senior citizen by defining family to exclude his spouse, the U.S. Court of Appeals for the Sixth Circuit has ruled.

Courthouse News' Lorraine Bailey reports that Medicare beneficiaries Leslie Wheaton, George Hart and Joe Turner did not also qualify for Medicaid benefits under a Ohio Department of Medicaid rule. That rule says that a spouse doesn't count as a member of a beneficiary's family.

Judge Raymond Kethledge opined, '"The term 'planet' might be ambiguous as applied to Pluto, but is clear as applied to Jupiter. And though there might be some ambiguity in 2015 as to whether Ukraine's borders encompass the Crimean Peninsula, there is no doubt that Kiev lies within them. So too here: whatever ambiguity the 'persons living under one roof' or 'basic unit of society' definitions might have at the margins, there is no doubt that, under either definition, a person's family includes her resident spouse."'

The pharmaceutical industry is asking Congress to exempt drug patents from an administrative procedure that allows patent challenges without having to go to federal court, The Wall Street Journal's Joseph Walker reports. But the Congressional Budget Office has found that enacting the exemption would delay the entry of new generic medicines to the market and would cost federal healthcare programs $1.3 billion over 10 years.

Jacob S. Sherkow, an associate law professor at New York Law School, told the WSJ that challenges to technology patents have been successful through the administrative procedure, but most pharma cases haven't been decided yet.