The Office of Medicare Hearings and Appeals (OMHA) announced that it is suspending the assignment of most new requests by long-term care providers for an Administrative Law Judge (ALJ) hearing because it has “been unable to keep pace with the exponential growth in requests for hearing.“ While OMHA will continue to assign and process hearing requests filed directly by Medicare beneficiaries, it does not expect to resume assignments of other appeals by providers for at least 24 months with post-assignment hearing wait times continuing to exceed 6 months.