This article was produced for ProPublica’s Local Reporting Network in partnership with the Miami Herald. Sign up for Dispatches to get stories like this one as soon as they are published.

Florida’s long-troubled compensation fund for infants born with catastrophic brain injuries has resolved one of its thorniest disputes: the claim that it avoided hundreds of millions in health care costs by raiding the safety net for impoverished Floridians.

The Birth-Related Neurological Injury Compensation Association, or NICA, settled a three-year-old whistleblower complaint that alleged the program grew assets of nearly $1.7 billion partly by dumping health care and caregiving costs onto Medicaid, the state-federal insurer for poverty-stricken and disabled Floridians.

Under the settlement, announced Monday by the U.S. Justice Department, NICA agreed to pay $51 million to resolve allegations that it violated the federal False Claims Act. NICA’s board of directors, ushered in last year as part of a far-reaching reform, already had voted to cease the program’s reliance on Medicaid.

Beginning in April 2021, the Miami Herald, in partnership with ProPublica, published a series of stories showing NICA withheld and delayed care to many families, focusing on stockpiling assets instead.

Administrators reduced costs, the Herald reported, partly by funneling families into Medicaid — a program already so poorly funded that a federal judge in late 2014 accused the state of rationing care and...

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