(This post is written by attorney James Young.)
Bert Lance, former Director of the Office of Management and Budget in 1977 under President Jimmy Carter, is credited with popularizing the phrase, “If it ain’t broke, don’t fix it!” in the May 1977 issue of the magazine Nation’s Business. The phrase was aimed towards government’s habit of fixing things that aren’t broken, while not fixing things that are.
(This post is written by attorney James Young.)
A recent review by the Mintz Levin firm took a look at 60 healthcare related qui tam cases that were unsealed between December 2017 and January 2018. The results of their review are both typical and maddening. The government intervened in only 14 percent of those unsealed cases.
Today Morgan & Morgan’s whistleblower team announced that Healogics, a Jacksonville, Florida-based wound care company, has agreed to pay $22.51 million to settle two lawsuits alleging that the company and its partner hospitals overbilled the government for unnecessary hyperbaric oxygen (“HBO”) treatments provided to Medicare patients.
As we make headway into 2018, it’s worth looking back at how great 2017 was for whistleblowers holding fraudsters accountable with record recoveries.
Our whistleblower team at Morgan & Morgan announces that a Sarasota doctor has agreed to pay $1.95 million to settle our client’s lawsuit accusing the doctor of billing the government for unnecessary ultrasounds performed on Medicare patients.
The act of whistleblowing is glorified in movies like Michael Clayton, The Constant Gardener, Serpico, and The Insider. In these films and so many others, individuals with a strong ethical compass step up and call to attention the wrongs being committed in their midst — often in their workplaces.
In the aftermath of hurricanes like Harvey, Irma, and Maria, government relief dollars will rightfully flow to communities hit by the devastation of those storms. With those relief dollars comes a sense of hope and renewal, but what also follows that funding stream are fraudsters looking to get their hands on some government money. The potential for False Claims Act violations abounds.
“Pharma Bro” Martin Shkreli was recently convicted of three counts of securities fraud after some of his own coworkers blew the whistle on his illegal investment activities. Shkreli earned his infamous nickname for purchasing the lifesaving AIDS drug Daraprim in 2015 and increasing the price five thousand percent. The recent conviction had nothing to do with his checkered past and only came about because employees who uncovered his financial misdeeds decided to turn him in.
In the midst of the Revolutionary War, ten sailors brought the first whistleblowing case in our nation’s history against the Commander-in-Chief of the Continental Navy. Although the nature of their accusations remains disputed until today, those individuals were our nation’s first whistleblowers, and their actions laid the ground for today’s National Whistleblower Appreciation Day.
Healthcare fraud is one of the most costly crimes in America, and the government devotes considerable resources to rooting out deceivers. In most cases, whistleblowers are the best source of information the government has to open investigations and obtain recoveries.
