Medicare Compliance & Reimbursement

Don't delay another day. If you haven't changed your business arrangements to comply with new Oct. 1 Stark requirements affecting certain leasing and under-arrangement deals, now's the time. In mid-October, Chicago attorney Kevin J. Ryan reported that's he was still in the midst of helping healthcare clients do that. "Right now those clients are not involved in Medicare referrals," he says, "so there are no violations." (The federal Stark law covers Medicare while the state self-referral laws apply to Medicaid, he adds, but the clients revamping their leases don't have Medicaid patients.) Meeting the new legal requirements is just one consideration, of course. Physicians will look at such deals from a business perspective to see if they still make sense, Pittsburgh, Pa. attorney Michael Cassidy tells Eli.