John R. Jacob represents multihospital health care systems, major academic medical centers and community hospitals and has extensive experience in counseling and litigation regarding Medicare and Medicaid regulatory matters.
With a particular focus on complex Medicare reimbursement and coverage disputes, Mr. Jacob has practiced extensively before federal and state courts and administrative tribunals, including the Department of Health and Human Services’ Provider Reimbursement Review Board (PRRB). In the past year alone, he has negotiated for hospitals either the settlement or administrative resolution of over 50 Medicare reimbursement cases pending before the PRRB or in federal court.
Mr. Jacob advises hospitals and other health industry entities on the numerous regulatory and policy issues they face in their daily operations, including reimbursement counseling; potential fraud and abuse and overpayment matters; voluntary disclosures; federal investigations; due diligence associated with various business arrangements, public debt offerings and private placements; and legislative and regulatory policy analysis, drafting and advocacy.
Mr. Jacob was one of four court-appointed “Plaintiffs’ Coordinating Counsel” (PCC) for In Re Medicare Reimbursement Litigation, a consolidated litigation, which included almost 300 cases and almost 700 hospitals challenging their Medicare disproportionate share hospital (DSH) payments. In March 2008, after more than three years of litigation and almost two years of complex settlement negotiations with the Department of Justice and the Department of Health and Human Services Office of General Counsel, the parties reached an historic settlement with the Medicare Program that paid the hospitals $666,125,000 in overdue Medicare payments. This is the single largest reimbursement settlement in the history of the Medicare Program, and besides being one of the PCC for the litigation, John was the lead negotiator of this settlement on behalf of all of the plaintiff-hospitals.
Mr. Jacob was nationally ranked as a top healthcare lawyer in the 2008-2010 editions of Chambers USA: America’s Leading Lawyers for Business. Nightingale’s Healthcare News named him as one of the Outstanding Healthcare Litigators for 2008; in 2005, the same publication also named him as one of the Outstanding Young Healthcare Lawyers of the year. Mr. Jacob is the author of “The Medicare Disproportionate Share Hospital Adjustment: A History of Litigation and Politics,” a chapter in 2009 Medicare and Medicaid Reimbursement Update (Wolters Kluwer 2009).
Mr. Jacob received his A.B. in English from Colgate University in 1988 and his J.D. cum laude in 1993 from the American University Washington College of Law, where he was the executive editor of the American University Law Review. Before joining Akin Gump, Mr. Jacob was a law clerk with the Attorney General of Maryland at the Maryland State Police Headquarters. Mr. Jacob is a member of the District of Columbia and Maryland bars, the American Health Lawyers Association and the D.C. Bar Association’s Health Law Section.
Mr. Jacob serves as the hiring partner for the firm’s Washington, D.C. office and he is a member of the firmwide and Washington office pro bono committees, as well as the Washington office diversity committee. He is also a member of the Board of Directors and the Executive Committee of the Washington Legal Clinic for the Homeless and he serves on the Leadership Council of Convergence, a nonprofit organization focused on achieving widely supportable solutions to major policy challenges.