Kindred Healthcare has agreed to settle allegations that it improperly billed Medicare and Medicaid for nursing home services it did not provide, just months after a federal judge ruled she would consider the claims of the whistleblower who brought the case.

Kindred, once a US nursing home giant, had argued that the 2016 case brought by Timothy Sirls in the US District Court for Pennsylvania was too similar to another False Claims case filed earlier in Kentucky. Whistleblowers can’t produce copy-cat suits using information already made public.

Last summer, Judge Karen Spencer Marston disagreed with Kindred and denied its motion for dismissal. On Monday, however, she ordered a dismissal of “any and all claims asserted” by Sirls against Kindred, citing a stipulation filed by the various parties on March 24.

Sirls claimed Kindred facilities in 10 states purposefully recruited patients with high needs “so that it could reap higher Medicare and Medicaid reimbursements” but also “purposefully understaffed the facilities so that it could see a higher profit from those reimbursements.”

The court had acknowledged a provision in the False Claims Act establishes that a whistleblower-triggered suit “shall be dismissed ‘if substantially the same allegations or transactions as alleged in the action or claim were publicly disclosed,’ unless ‘the person bringing the action is an original source of the information.’”

But Marston in August decided that the case of Sirls, who spent four...

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