Articles

04.23.12

New Trend in Sustainable HIEs: Fair Share Financial Support

CMS recently solidified a new trend in electronic health information exchange sustainability: requiring all stakeholders who stand to benefit from electronic HIE to share in a portion of its costs. It seems like common sense, but a scan of HIE initiatives reveals that HIE traditionally has been ...


04.23.12

Giving Meaningful Use Time to Settle In

The news coming from the "meaningful use" frontlines in recent weeks is like the opening line of "A Tale of Two Cities." The May 26 announcement that Boston-based Beth Israel Deaconess Medical Center was the first hospital to receive a Medicare meaningful use (MU) incentive ...


04.23.12

California's New Apportionment Rules for Multistate Taxpayers

Over the past two years, the California legislature has enacted significant changes in California tax law, including a substantial modification to California’s apportionment rules (New Apportionment Rules) used to determine California-source business income, for franchise and income tax ...


04.23.12

Dodd-Frank Wall Street Reform and Consumer Protection Act

The enactment of the Dodd-Frank Wall Street Reform and Consumer Protection Act (the "Dodd-Frank Act") on July 21, 2010 presents unique challenges for Boards of Directors of community banks. In particular, in the absence of regulations which have yet to be implemented, each community bank ...


04.23.12

Private Funding of Energy Efficiency Retrofits

Although government, environmentalists and fiscal hawks rarely agree on environmental issues, a new public-private partnership to finance U.S. energy efficiency retrofits (the “Retrofit Program”) is attracting broad public support. The Retrofit Program is being funded by a private ...


04.23.12

The NAD Sets Precedent for Others in Media, Marketing

In the midst of the current debate regarding behavioral advertising and the industry's strong desire for a self-regulatory approach, it is useful to look at the National Advertising Division of the Council of Better Business Bureaus as a model for successful self-regulation.


04.23.12

The Struggle to Preserve Coal: Clean Coal, the EPA's Final Rules Related to Carbon Capture and ...

March 7, 2011—In his recent State of the Union address, President Obama stressed the importance of clean energy, and noted that, “[s]ome folks want wind and solar. Others want nuclear, clean coal and natural gas. To meet this goal, we will need them all . . . .” The term ...


04.23.12

What Is Really Causing Renewable Project Failures in California?

It is clear that the development of renewable and clean energy projects in California and the reduction of greenhouse gas emissions has been successful, but has also been impeded by a variety of causes. With the required percentage of renewable resources being increased to 33% in the future, a ...


04.23.12

A Tale of 2 Meats

In two different cases companies have been accused of making false statements about their meat products.A class action was filed in a Florida federal court against Kraft Foods Inc. and Hormel Foods Corp., in which the plaintiffs allege that the fat-free-percentage claims on deli meat products are ...


04.23.12

Milestones Mark ARRA, HITECH First Quarter

The first quarter of 2011 brought a couple of notable milestones in the federal government's implementation of the American Recovery and Reinvestment Act of 2009 -- the arrival of a new national coordinator for health IT and an invitation to the public to help define the country's health IT ...