Department of Defense December 18, 2018 – Federal Register Recent Federal Regulation Documents

On June 8, 2018, DLA published an NOA in the Federal Register announcing the publication of the Environmental Assessment (EA) Addressing Construction and Operation of a Fiscal Year 2019 (FY19) General Purpose Warehouse (GPW) at DLA Distribution Red River, Red River Army Depot, Texas. The EA was available for a 30-day public comment period that ended July 9, 2018. The EA was prepared as required under the National Environmental Policy Act (NEPA) of 1969. In addition, the EA complied with DLA and Army NEPA regulations. No comments from the public were received during the EA public comment period.

This rule exercises the Department of Defense's (DoD's) authority to update current regulations to compute reasonable charges for inpatient and ambulatory (outpatient) institutional resources and also for pharmaceuticals, durable medical equipment (DME), supplies, immunizations, injections or other medications administered or furnished by DoD military treatment facilities (MTFs) under their three existing healthcare cost recovery programsThird Party Collections, Medical Services Account, and Medical Affirmative Claims. Specifically, the rule updates the reasonable charges methodologies for inpatient and ambulatory institutional billing to allow for the use of Itemized Resource Utilization (IRU) based ratesdeveloped from the cost to provide inpatient and ambulatory institutional healthcare resourcesin addition to current bundled prospective reimbursement approaches of diagnostic related group (DRG), ambulatory payment classification (APC), ambulatory surgery center (ASC) and ambulatory procedure visit (APV) based rates. It also revises the reasonable charges methodology for pharmaceuticals, DME, supplies, immunizations, injections or medication administered to allow for their calculation using either Civilian Health and Medical Program of the Uniformed Services (CHAMPUS) prevailing rates or IRU based ratesdeveloped from the cost to provide these healthcare items and resources- regardless of whether CHAMPUS prevailing rates are available. The additional IRU methodology implements an itemized rate and reasonable charges structure that improves collections and operation of DoD's healthcare cost recovery programs by ensuring MTFs receive appropriate reimbursement for institutional healthcare resources as well as for pharmaceuticals, DME, supplies, immunizations, injections or medication provided or administered and is more consistent with civilian health insurance industry practice. The proposed rule also replaces ``hospital'' with ``institutional'' throughout most of the regulation to align it with civilian health insurance industry terminology and better promote identification and separate billing of institutional and professional services.