The Courts

A federal judge ruled Monday (June 8) that AbbVie did not violate antitrust law by filing more than 100 similar patents for its top-selling drug Humira.

A federal appeals court is grappling with whether states are required to reimburse Medicaid managed care plans for a controversial Obamacare tax -- and, if they aren’t, whether the federal government must pay back nearly $500 million to six states that challenged the regulatory regime surrounding the tax.

Hospitals that were underpaid by Medicare in fiscal 2014 through 2016 are not entitled to precise refunds because CMS’ alternative remedy -- a one-time, across-the-board rate increase in 2017 that was meant to roughly offset the previous underpayments -- was reasonable, a federal appeals court ruled Tuesday (May 26).

A federal appeals court on Wednesday (May 20) upheld a lower-court ruling that invalidated New Hampshire’s plan to add work requirements to its Medicaid program -- a development that was expected based on an earlier appellate ruling against work requirements in Arkansas.

Health care experts and stakeholders across the ideological spectrum have filed more than two dozen amici or “friend of the court” briefs urging the Supreme Court to rule the Affordable Care Act’s individual mandate valid or at the very least to find that if the mandate is illegal it can be clearly severed from the rest of the law.

Two federal appellate judges on Friday (May 8) expressed reluctance to second-guess the Trump administration’s restrictive public charge rule, which penalizes legal immigrants who rely on Medicaid or other supplemental benefits.

The Affordable Care Act’s contraceptive mandate returned to the Supreme Court for the third time Wednesday (May 6) as the justices yet again tackled -- without reaching any apparent consensus -- the hot-button question of how to balance the religious rights of employers against the rights of women employees to access birth control.

A federal appeals court should revive a controversial overpayment rule in Medicare Advantage because, without the rule in place, CMS has limited ability to stop MA plans from engaging in one-sided medical reviews that artificially inflate their payments, the agency says in a recent legal brief.

The government must pay insurers money owned under the Affordable Care Act’s risk corridor program, the Supreme Court ruled Monday (April 27), which could lead to issuers getting about $12 billion.