At a House Oversight and Government Affairs Committee subcommittee hearing earlier this month, whistleblower Richard West testified about how Medicaid fraud affected the quality of care he received. West, who has muscular dystrophy and qualifies for 16 hours of in-home nursing care every day, said he didn’t receive over 700…
In his whistleblower fraud lawsuit, Michael Rehfeldt, a former Vitas Healthcare Corp. manager, accuses the hospice care chain of defrauding the US government. Vitas is a unit of Chemed Corp. Rehfeldt claims that Vitas and health insurers enrolled patients that weren’t fatally ill in Medicare. He is alleging fraudulent billing…
Senate Finance Committee Chair Max Baucus (D, Mont.) and Senator Charles Grassley (R, Iowa) of the Senate Judiciary Committee are looking at whether insurers’ practice of directing tests to specific labs in return for payments or discounts from the labs violate federal anti-kickback laws. This practice is known as “pull…
A former Boca Raton Regional Hospital has filed a whistleblower complaint accusing the facility’s administrators of purposely using the wrong billing code to defraud Medicare of at least $2M. This was allegedly an attempt to get more government money for treating patients with heart problems. For now, the US Justice…
Pfizer Inc. has agreed to pay $14.5 million to the federal government, the District of Columbia, and 49 states to settle claims that the drug manufacturer not only improperly marketed its bladder control medication Detrol but also cheated Medicaid. The allegations were made by former sales representatives Marci Drimer and…
In the wake of securities lawsuits accusing Bank of New York Mellon Corp. of defrauding investors and overcharging them on billions of dollars in currency trades over 10 years, now comes news that the government had been working with a secret whistleblower. Grant Wilson, who worked at the bank’s small…
A former SouthernCare employee has filed a whistleblower complaint against the hospice company. Karina Christensen is accusing Southern Care of charging Medicare for hospice care that was given to treat patients who weren’t dying. In order to have hospice care covered under Medicare, a doctor must have determined that the…
According to Bloomberg.com, Robert Rogers is suing his mother’s hospice provider for wrongful death and elder abuse. His 91-year-old mom Thelma Covington died of sepsis infection triggered by poor circulation and gangrene in September 2008. Just 5 days before her death, 11 maggots had to be removed from an open…
Did you know that pharmaceutical fraud is one of the most common reasons for False Claims Act recoveries? Not only that, but this type of fraud is costing taxpayers millions annually. If you are an employee working in the pharmaceutical industry and you have information about fraud being committed by…
Six years after Hunter Laboratories acted as a whistleblower to file a Medicaid Fraud Lawsuit against eight medical testing lab companies for allegedly overcharging California’s Medicaid programs and giving medical kickbacks to doctors in exchange for patient referrals, defendant LabCorp will settle the case for $49.5 million. In California ex…