June 8, 2017
The Justice Department recently settled two cases involving kickbacks between doctors and home health care companies providing services to Medicare patients. Offering and/or accepting kickbacks has been banned by Congress and it violates the False Claims Act.
As the Justice Department said in a recent release:
“The Anti-Kickback Statute and the Stark Law are intended to ensure that a physician’s medical judgment is not compromised by improper financial incentives. The Anti-Kickback Statute prohibits offering, paying, soliciting or receiving remuneration to induce referrals of items or services covered by federal health care programs, including Medicare. The Stark Law forbids a home health care provider from billing Medicare for certain services referred by physicians who have a financial relationship with the entity.”
The first case involved two South Florida medical doctors and their wives who allegedly accepted sham marketer salaries in exchange for their husbands’ referrals to A Plus Home Health Care Inc. Dr. Alan and Lynn Buhler agreed to pay to the United States $1.047 million and Dr. Craig and Cynthia Prokos agreed to pay $90,000 to settle allegations that accepting such kickbacks violated the False Claims Act.
The second case involved Recovery Home Care Inc. and Recovery Home Care Services Inc. who allegedly paid dozens of physicians thousands of dollars per month to perform patient chart reviews in return for referring their patients to Recovery Home Care. The government contended that these doctors were over-compensated for any actual work they performed and the payments were an illegal inducement.
Recovery Home Care agreed to pay $1.1 million to resolve allegations that the Recovery Home Care entities violated the False Claims Act. Whistleblower Gregory Simony, a former employee of Recovery Home Care, will receive $198,000 of the recovered funds. The government continues to litigate this case against Recovery Home Care’s previous owner, Mark Conklin.
As they say, “it takes two to tango” and in health care that often means the “partners” are the doctors and another health care provider. The cases above involved home health care companies, but in other instances improper relationships could involve, for example, hospitals, hospice care, to name just a couple. Any health care provider who depends on physician referrals is in a position to improperly influence the doctor’s judgment with illegal kickbacks. Medicare patients deserve conflict free medical care, as do the taxpayers.
For more on home health care fraud, see the announcement last year of the largest home health care fraud settlement against Amedisys – United States ex rel. CAF Partners v. Amedisys, et al., Civ. No.:10-cv-02323 (E.D. PA) – in which the Whistleblower Law Collaborative represented one of the relators.