Followers & Friends – BIG Announcement coming out today! If you haven’t seen our new NATIONAL platform, check it out here at http://www.nationalhealthcarelawfirm.com and stay tuned for our #healthcare #legal news at 2pm EST !!!
Category Archives: Sherman Act
The Florida Healthcare Law Firm Announces National Expansion
(Delray Beach, FL) June 21st, 2012 – The Florida Healthcare Law Firm, one of Florida’s leading healthcare law firms, today announced a major increase in their legal practice capabilities with the official launch of the National Healthcare Law Firm, a d/b/a and new portal of the firm. The expansion to a national platform providing healthcare legal services to physicians and healthcare businesses is one that significantly increases resources for clients who lack qualified local healthcare counsel. While the Florida Healthcare Law Firm has for years assisted clients outside the state of Florida*, this new development further cements the firm’s commitment to providing ethical legal counsel in the healthcare industry.“We are very excited about it. The fact that we serve clients all over the country has been a small secret for a while but we realized there’s a huge demand and decided to just go for it,” said Jeffrey L. Cohen, Esq. Founder and President of Florida Healthcare Law Firm.
According to Cohen, “It’s just a strange area of the law. Nearly everything in healthcare business is regulated; leases, employment agreements, compensation. Things you wouldn’t think are regulated are strongly regulated. And there are large fines and criminal penalties for getting it wrong! Our clients understand that healthcare business of any kind has serious legal risks and that they need uniquely qualified help.”
To request a service list or for any other firm information, call Autumn Piccolo at 888-455-7702 or visit the firm’s website at www.nationalhealthcarelawfirm.com or www.floridahealthcarelawfirm.com
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Acknowledged throughout the country for its service and excellence, Florida Healthcare Law Firm is one of the nation’s leading providers of healthcare legal services. Founded by Jeffrey L. Cohen, Esq and headquartered in South Florida, FHLF provides legal services to physicians and healthcare businesses with the right pricing responsiveness and ethics. From healthcare clinic regulation, home health agency representation and physician contracting to medical practice formation/representation and federal and state compliance matters, the Florida Healthcare Law Firm is committed to bringing knowledge and experience to a diverse group of clients.
#FHLF October 2011 Newsletter
Click Here to view our October 2011 Newsletter:
http://conta.cc/qFxblP
Anti Trust Concerns Greatly Affect Healthcare Reform – Part 2: Illustrations
Case #1: A payer approaches you and several of your colleagues, who are competitors. The payer gives you a contract and fee schedule, which you review with your colleagues. Though the payer recognizes that you are not a physician group practice, it would like to deal with just one of you for contracting purposes. You choose one of you to Arepresent@ the group of you, and seek changes in the contract, including the fee schedule.
Impression: The Sherman Act has been violated. Since you and your colleagues are competitors and are not members of a single professional corporation through which you conduct all or substantially all of your professional practices, you may not discuss fees among yourselves, and you may not appoint someone to act as the voice of the Agroup.@ In addition to the price fixing described above, if you decided together not to contract with the payer, you would have engaged in a group boycott.
The violations can be avoided by properly structuring a formal group and adhering to certain rules in negotiating with payers. In scrutinizing activities of a physician organization, one of the key things antitrust enforcement authorities will examine is the degree of the organization=s Aeconomic integration,@ the degree to which economic risk is shared among the shareholders. The level of integration is key in determining whether the organization is a single economic unit or whether it is comprised of two or more economic units.
Determining whether a physician organization is sufficiently integrated is often, however, an extremely difficult task. The law changes and is very fact-specific. The FTC looks to such things as: 1) whether the organization is capitated; 2) the extent services are centralized in the organization; and 3) accountability of the shareholders to the organization through such things as utilization management, quality assurance and peer review.
Florida Healthcare Law Firm Blog 