HHS Office for Civil Rights Director Melanie Fontes Rainer on Progress and News at OCR
Updates to Statute 1557 that Healthcare Providers Need to Know
A Mississippi federal district court has issued a nationwide injunction and stay on some of the new federal regulations concerning Affordable Care Act (ACA) Section 1557, which prohibits discrimination in specified health...more
The Affordable Care Act, which was signed into law in 2010, contained a provision (commonly referred to as Section 1557) prohibiting discrimination on the basis of race, color, national origin, sex, age or disability in...more
Seyfarth Synopsis: Following years of back and forth, new final rules were published by the Department of Health and Human Services (HHS) on May 6, 2024 reinstituting the Department’s interpretation that the prohibition on...more
In a Final Rule issued on May 6, 2024, the U.S. Department of Health and Human Services (“DHHS”) finalized regulations implementing Section 1557 of the Affordable Care Act (“Section 1557”). The Final Rule updates and...more
In Religious Sisters of Mercy v. Azar, 2021 U.S. Dist. LEXIS 9156 (D.N.D. Jan. 19, 2021), a district court awarded a group of plaintiffs permanent injunctive relief against a provision of the Affordable Care Act ("ACA") that...more
Report on Medicare Compliance 29, no. 30 (August 24, 2020) - A federal court on Aug. 17 blocked HHS from enforcing its revised definition of sex discrimination in Sec. 1557, which prohibits discrimination on the basis of...more
On July 7, 2020, we published a client alert regarding the Department of Health and Human Services (the “HHS”) June 19, 2020 rule (“2020 Rule”) modifying the non-discrimination provision (“Section 1557”) of the Patient...more
One day before an updated rule of the US Department of Health and Human Services regarding Section 1557 of the Patient Protection and Affordable Care Act took effect, the US District Court for the Eastern District of New York...more
Judge Frederick Block of the U.S. District Court for the Eastern District of New York has preliminarily enjoined HHS from revising the Obama-era definitions of sex discrimination under Section 1557 of the ACA. See Walker v....more
The U.S. District Court for the Eastern District of New York has blocked the U.S. Department of Health and Human Services (HHS) from enforcing a new rule that limited sex discrimination in healthcare to discrimination based...more
On Friday, March 24, 2019, the US Department of Health and Human Services issued a proposed rule (along with a related fact sheet) under Section 1557 of the Affordable Care Act (ACA) that would make significant changes to the...more
On December 31, 2016, the Federal District Court for the Northern District of Texas issued a nationwide injunction blocking the implementation or enforcement of Section 1557’s provision extending the definition of sex...more
On July 10, 2017, the Northern District of Texas stayed its much-watched Section 1557 case (known as the Franciscan Alliance case) pending HHS’s decision to revisit or revise its regulation under Section 1557. At issue in...more
As LGBTQ rights have taken center stage in political and social issues, FordHarrison has been following ground-breaking litigation related to LGBTQ rights and providing updates. In the latest decision, a federal judge in...more
This past May, the Department of Health and Human Services (HHS) issued a final rule implementing Section 1557 of the Affordable Care Act (ACA), which prohibits discrimination on the basis of race, color, national origin,...more
The U.S. Department of Health and Human Services (HHS) recently published its Final Rule implementing Section 1557 of the Affordable Care Act (ACA), which prohibits discrimination on the basis of, among other grounds, sex in...more
In earlier articles, I have called Section 1557 “the future of healthcare discrimination litigation” and the “legal side of health equity.” HHS/OCR’s final rule under Section 1557—which will go into effect on July 18,...more