The US government’s funding lapsed on October 1, 2025. For government contractors, this means navigating immediate uncertainty in maintaining operations and mitigating financial exposure.
The US House of Representatives passed its One Big Beautiful Bill Act on May 22, 2025 (the Act), but nonprofit health systems may not find much about the Act that’s attractive. If passed by the US Senate and signed into law, the Act would threaten already thin operating margins at nonprofit hospitals and health systems by expanding the executive compensation excise tax, taxing parking, and similar employee benefits.
The US Senate Judiciary Committee has advanced six bills aimed at reducing pharmaceutical prices and improving market competitiveness. These bills address various issues, including limiting the number of patents a biologics license holder can assert in litigation, clarifying the boundaries of permissible settlements in “pay for delay” agreements, and preventing “product hopping” by branded drug manufacturers. Additionally, the bills seek to curb abuses of the US Food and Drug Administration’s citizen petition process, improve interagency coordination on patent information, and mandate the Federal Trade Commission publish a report analyzing pharmaceutical benefit manager pricing practices and the pharmaceutical supply chain.
On September 26, the US Government Accountability Office (GAO) released a report titled “Medicare Telehealth: Actions Needed to Strengthen Oversight and Help Providers Educate Patients on Privacy and Security Risks.” The 75-page report describes the utilization of Medicare telehealth services under current pandemic-related waivers, the Centers for Medicare & Medicaid Services (CMS) efforts to identify and monitor risks posed by the current waivers, and a change made by the US Department of Health and Human Services (HHS) Office for Civil Rights (OCR) to the enforcement of regulations governing patients’ protected health information during the COVID-19 public health emergency (PHE).
GAO made four recommendations—three directed to CMS and one directed to OCR—aimed at remedying the issues set forth in the report:
Among its utilization findings, the GAO report found that the use of telehealth services increased from about five million services pre-waiver (April to December 2019) to more than 53 million services post-waiver (April to December 2020) and that, post-waiver, 5% of providers delivered more than 40% of telehealth services, and 5% of beneficiaries accounted for almost 40% of telehealth utilization.
The report noted that CMS lacks complete data on the use of audio-only technology and telehealth visits furnished in patients’ homes, because there is no billing mechanism for providers to identify all instances of audio-only visits, and because providers are not required to use available codes to identify visits furnished in homes. The GAO report also noted that OCR did not advise providers about specific language to use or give direction on explaining risks to patients, with respect to OCR’s March 2020 policy that it would not impose penalties against providers for noncompliance with privacy and security requirements in connection with the good faith provision of telehealth during the PHE.
This GAO report comes on the heels of a recent report from the HHS Office of Inspector General that found little evidence of waste and fraud related to Medicare telehealth services during the first year of the pandemic. These reports are part of a broader push by Congress and the Biden administration to examine current telehealth flexibilities and determine how to extend them beyond the COVID-19 PHE.
On June 7, 2022, Senators Cynthia Lummis (R-WY) and Kirsten Gillibrand (D-NY) introduced the highly anticipated Responsible Financial Innovation Act (the bill), which sets out to create the first complete regulatory and bipartisan framework for digital assets. The bill is intended to establish some legal clarity for regulators and the industry and to protect consumers by providing a range of disclosures and clarifying settlement conditions and rights over digital ownership. The bill would also treat all digital assets that are not treated as securities as commodities regulated by the Commodity Futures Trading Commission. This article discusses key tax considerations raised by the bill concerning taxation and reporting requirements for participants in the digital asset industry.
The Democrats have control of all three levers of power—the Senate, the House and the presidency—for the first time since the early years of the Obama administration.
How will President Biden use this new concentration of power to shape healthcare policy?
A recent article in Medscape outlined seven key healthcare actions that Biden could pursue, with McDermottPlus consultant Rodney Whitlock weighing in.
Employers considering President Trump’s plan to allow deferred payment of payroll taxes face a series of costs, uncertainties and headaches. The president wants employers to stop collecting the 6.2% levy that is the employee share of Social Security taxes for many workers, starting September 1 and going through the end of the year. The president’s plan doesn’t change how much tax employees and employers actually owe. Only Congress can do that.
In a recent article by The Wall Street Journal, David Fuller, a tax lawyer at McDermott in Washington, DC, said, “We’re looking at a crystal ball not knowing what we’re going to see.”
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