Category: Healthcare
On November 10, 2010, U.S. District Court Judge Maurice B. Cohill, Jr., of the Western District of Pennsylvania denied the defendant’s Motion for Summary Judgment, thereby permitting the qui tam action by the doctors and U.S. Government to go forward. Doctors Dilbagh Singh, Paul Kirsch, Rao Nadella, and Martin Jacobs filed a qui tam action pursuant to the False Claims Act against Bradford Regional Medical Center (“BRMC”),
On October 20, 2010, the Department of Health and Human Services’ (“HHS”) Office of Inspector General (“OIG”) announced guidelines enabling the barring of executives of pharmaceutical companies from contracting with U.S. Government health programs when they know, or if the OIG concludes they should have known, about Medicare fraud at their company.
St. Joseph Medical Center has agreed to pay the United States $22 million to settle allegations under the False Claims Act that it paid unlawful remuneration under the Anti-Kickback Act and violated the Stark Law when it entered into a series of professional services contracts with MidAtlantic Cardiovascular Associates.
For more information see: http://www.justice.gov/opa/pr/2010/November/10-civ-1271.html
On October 27, 2010, GlaxoSmithKline (“GSK”), the world’s fourth-largest pharmaceutical company by revenue, announced that it had finalized a settlement with the U.S. Government to resolve both civil False Claims Act allegations and criminal allegations related to GSK’s faulty manufacturing of prescription medications at the company’s former plant in Cidra,
Four Miami-Dade healthcare operators have been charged with scheming to defraud Medicare out of a $200 million by fraudulently billing for mental health services. A whistleblower lawsuit was filed against American Therapeutic, the nation’s largest chain of community mental health centers licensed by Medicare. American Therapeutic and its senior employees were charged with scheming to bill Medicare for unnecessary group therapy sessions or sessions that never occurred.
Johnson & Johnson was required to pay $257.7 million to the state of Louisiana for wrongfully marketing the antipsychotic drug Risperdal. The case centered on claims that J&J and Ortho-McNeil Janssen sent correspondence letters in 2003 to 700,000 doctors which labeled Risperdal as safer then its competitors and minimized its links to diabetes.
With the recent $422.5 million settlement by Novartis in the Eastern District of Pennsylvania, now seems to be a good time to step back and look more broadly at the magnitude of recent FCA settlements. Over the past 22 months alone, a total of 11 pharmaceutical companies have paid over $6 billion to the government.
In 2006, Charles Donigan sued his former employer, St. Jude Medical, under the Federal False Claims Act for allegedly paying kickbacks to physicians and other health care providers to induce them to use St. Jude medical devices, including pacemakers. Four years later, after the government indicated its intent to intervene in the lawsuit,
Allergan settled claims of off-label marketing of its Botox pharmaceutical and other claims for a total of $600 million. The government accused Allergan of recommending Botox for unapproved uses including headache, pain, spasticity and juvenile cerebral palsy. As part of the settlement, Allergan also pleaded guilty to misdemeanor charge of misbranding,
A physician, clinic owner and a number of clinic nurses pleaded guilty to participating in a large Medicare fraud conspiracy. Dr. Fred Dweck, Yudel Cayro and others referred numerous Medicare recipients for unnecessary home health care services and charged those services to Medicare. In total, Medicare paid more than $32 million of the $53 million fraudulent claims billed.
