Federal prosecutors earlier this week filed a complaint against the Memphis Methodist health system, taking over a qui tam action initially filed by private whistleblowers, who alleged that Methodist’s six-year arrangement with West Clinic, an oncology private practice, violated the Anti-Kickback Statute and the False Claims Act.
The “complaint in intervention” filed by the U.S. Department of Justice on April 11 relies on evidence turned up during the government’s investigation to argue that the deal between West and Methodist Le Bonheur Healthcare and Methodist Healthcare-Memphis Hospitals resulted in improper charges amounting to hundreds of millions of dollars in damages to Medicare.
West is not a defendant in the DOJ lawsuit. Before the government stepped in, the private plaintiffs had settled with West in exchange for a payment of $2.6 million and an agreement to provide internal information on their deal with Methodist (The Cancer Letter, March 18, 2022).
May 12, 2021
The just-filed DOJ complaint is consistent with the previous version filed by the private whistleblowers. Nonetheless, the government’s document is based on a separate investigation, is more succinct, more granular, and illustrated with once proprietary slides from presentations describing the business relationship in question.
The DOJ complaint describes the West-Methodist deal as somewhat akin to the story of Jonah. West is swallowed whole by Methodist on Jan. 1, 2012, and re-emerges whole on Dec. 31,...
A front-page article with the byline of veteran New York Times opinion writer Nicholas Kristof is the latest poisonous example of what I call the NGO “halo effect.” Headlined “The Silence That Mee...