Category: Healthcare
On Monday, the DOJ announced the resolution of criminal allegations and a False Claims Act (“FCA”) lawsuit a relating to a scheme to defraud the United States and obtain kickbacks in exchange for patient referrals. A major U.S. hospital chain, Tenet Healthcare Corporation and two subsidiaries, Atlanta Medical Center, Inc.
Respironics is to pay $34.8 million for alleged False Claims Act violations related to the sale of sleep masks designed to treat sleep apnea. Allegedly Respironics, a Murrysville, PA based company, paid kickbacks in the form of free call center services to durable medical equipment (DME) companies that purchased the masks.
In 2014, the total whistleblower recoveries amounted to just shy of $3 billion, $2.2 billion (73 percent) of which were in the health care arena.
When the Department of Justice announces a False Claims Act recovery, they put the total recovery into the headline (the total amount that the fraudster is paying as a result of the FCA action),
The Justice Department announced that it has reached a $1.25 million settlement with ev3, a medical device manufacturer base in in Minnesota. Ev3 formerly was known as Fox Hollow Technologies. A lawsuit filed under the whistleblower provision of the False Claims Act alleges that between 2006-2007, Fox Hollow induced 12 hospitals in 9 states to admit patients who were undergoing elective atherectomy procedures.
Even as the abuse of prescription drugs has escalated and the national crackdown on it has occurred, new data suggests that doctors are prescribing even larger numbers of prescriptions for the most potent controlled substances to Medicare patients.
And, along with the increase in the number of prescriptions written,
In another win for the HEAT (Health Care Fraud Prevention and Enforcement Action Team) initiative, EBI, LLC, a medical device company in Parsippany, New Jersey, doing business as Biomet Spine and Bone Healing Technologies and Biomet, Inc., will pay $6 million to resolve allegations of violations of the federal Anti-Kickback Statute.
Shire Pharmaceuticals, LLC, a pharmaceuticals company based in Pennsylvania, recently signed a settlement agreement with the Department of Justice to resolve False Claims Act allegations related to its promotion practices of several drugs. Shire, which both manufactures and sells pharmaceuticals used in treating attention deficit hyperactivity disorder (ADHD), was facing allegations that it violated the False Claims Act beginning in 2004.
The Eighth Circuit had previously stated that one who files a lawsuit under the False Claims Act must provide examples of the allegedly fraudulent conduct. Last week, the court seemed to back away from this position in United States ex. rel. Thayer v. Planned Parenthood of the Heartland,
The First Circuit Court of Appeals recently held that False Claims Act defendants can deduct portions of their civil settlement payments if the parties have not, in negotiating a settlement, agreed to the tax consequences and the payment is considered compensatory as opposed to punitive.
Between 1993 and 1997,
The New York Times published an article noting that, despite huge investments in preventing Medicare fraud—up to $600 million a year—fraud against the program persists to the tune of $60 billion, which is equivalent to 10% of Medicare’s cost. For example, last year, the federal government was only able to recover $4.3 billion.
