As the world enters the third year of the COVID-19 pandemic, employers have gained a greater understanding about the virus’ relationship with US anti-discrimination laws. With the inevitable rise of future variants and long-haul COVID-19 cases, however, businesses are still navigating murky waters. In this Law360 article, McDermott Partner Lindsay Ditlow offers perspective about worker accommodation requests and what they mean for employers.
The US Supreme Court’s January ruling allowing the Centers for Medicare & Medicaid Services to enforce its COVID-19 mandate is likely to continue to face challenges. Nevertheless, in this article published by the Health Care Compliance Association, McDermott Partner Sandra DiVarco said that the Supreme Court’s decision wasn’t a surprise.
“Many of [the CMS] providers may have slow-walked their compliance and now in theory need to be fully compliant,” DiVarco noted.
The US Supreme Court’s January ruling that stayed enforcement of the US Occupational Safety and Health Administration’s (OSHA) shot-or-test mandate may limit some employers from introducing their own vaccination, testing or mask requirements. However, in this Bloomberg Law article, McDermott Partner Michelle Strowhiro said employers might still want to consider implementing portions of the standard—so long as state and local limits let them.
On January 25, 2022, the US Occupational Safety and Health Administration (OSHA) announced that it would withdraw its controversial “vax-or-test” Emergency Temporary Standard (ETS), which required large employers to impose vaccination or testing requirements upon their employees. The withdrawal will be effective as soon as the announcement is published in the Federal Register, which is scheduled to occur on January 26, 2022.
Healthcare and life sciences lawyers will likely have plenty of work in 2022 thanks to pending legislative and regulatory actions throughout the healthcare, health insurance, and drug and device industries.
According to this Law360 article, surprise billing, abortion and drug pricing are some of the major issues facing lawmakers and regulators in the year ahead. McDermott Partner Michael Ryan noted that changes to the Medical Device User Fee Amendments (MDUFA) also could be in order.
Throughout US President Joe Biden’s first year in office, the Biden administration reversed numerous Trump-era policies, including those concerning the US Equal Employment Opportunity Commission, federal contractors, wage data and LGBTQ bias. In this Law360 article, McDermott Partner Rachel Cowen offers insight into how the friction between religious and LGBTQ rights will continue to play out throughout employment law.
While the fate of the Centers for Medicare & Medicaid Services’ (CMS) November 5 vaccination mandate rests in the hands of the federal courts, experts say the potential loss of healthcare employees outweighs any of the mandate’s benefits. In this Health Care Compliance Association article, McDermott Partner Sandra M. DiVarco called the situation “bonkers.”
“Almost every hospital has so many unfilled positions, and they are concerned even a small amount of forced terminations will impact their ability to staff and risk burnout in the staff they have,” DiVarco said.
Hospitals are pushing back after the US Department of Health and Human Services (HHS) cut Medicaid reimbursement rates to participating hospitals under the 340B drug discount program.
According to this article published in The Well News, 340B program supporters have filed a petition with the Supreme Court, arguing that HHS failed to collect sufficient data and that the department overstepped its authority with the cuts. McDermott Partner Emily Jane Cook said that the cuts will mean rural hospitals are “deprived of an important source of support for the services that they provide to their communities.”
The US Supreme Court announced in July that it will take up review of the decision by the US Court of Appeals for the District of Columbia Circuit upholding Medicare’s 2018 payment cuts to 340B drugs. The case will be closely watched, given its potentially far-reaching impacts on reimbursements to most hospitals that participate in the Medicare program, not just those that participate in the 340B Program.
How should the federal and state governments approach remote work taxation? In this Law360 article, McDermott partner Kathleen Quinn says the growing complexity of remote work highlights the need for guidance.
“What’s becoming even more problematic is now, we don’t just have people that work in a New York office and they traditionally work from home from New Jersey,” Quinn said. “Now, people are saying, ‘Well, I’m going to work from New Jersey, then in the winter I’m going to work from Florida…and then maybe for a month I’ll go to Europe.’ It really becomes sort of a withholding mess.”
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