A ruling by a federal appeals court has helped reinforce the right of hospitals to claim both rural and urban status for the sake of better reimbursement. The ruling, by the 2nd U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals in New York, allows the dual claim for urban facilities without having to revoke the rural classification. Many hospitals argue that the Department of Health and Human Service's reclassification rule of 2000 led to unnecessary extra drug costs due to being disqualified from some portions of the 340B drug purchasing program. In his decision, Judge Jed Rakoff said the complications were unnecessary, and "simply increases the number of situations in which hospitals can be treated as rural for some purposes and urban for others, but there is nothing 'absurd' about such a measured approach. An agency may not rewrite clear statutory terms to suit its own sense of how the statute should operate." Read the full article at FierceHealthcare