A federal appeals court ruled Tuesday that a lower court did not have the authority to decide on a payment dispute affecting Texas hospitals because the facilities did not exhaust Medicare’s internal administrative appeals process.
The US Court of Appeals for the Fifth Circuit reversed a decision from the US District Court for the Northern District of Texas, which had found that the Biden administration’s Department of Health and Human Services unlawfully restricted payments to low-income-serving Texas hospitals, because the court lacked jurisdiction to hear the merits of the case.
The opinion found that the plaintiffs should have brought their ...