A federal court has thrown out an 8-year-old False Claims lawsuit alleging fraud by a Maryland nursing home and its therapy partner because the whistleblowers were not the first to make the allegations.
Two plaintiffs connected to Select Rehabilitation sued Anchorage SNF, its former parent company White Oak Healthcare and its current owner CommuniCare Health Services, alleging that the facility engaged in a scheme to defraud the government in conjunction with the therapy firm.
But White Oak and CommuniCare asked the US District Court for the District of Maryland to dismiss the case, arguing that another whistleblower had in 2015 brought a separate but very similar suit alleging the same scheme by Select and several nursing homes in Pennsylvania.
US District Court Judge James Bredar granted that motion Oct. 10, finding that the False Claims Act prohibits copycat suits through a “first-to-file” protection. Select had already used the first-to-file rule to get itself removed from the Anchorage case in late 2022, but the facility and its owners were still being targeted.
While Pennsylvania District Court Judge Timothy Savage previously ruled that naming new, unrelated defendants in a similar scheme meant that the first-to-file rule shouldn’t apply, Bredar found it did, based on a more recent Circuit Court interpretation.
He noted that the FCA relies on whistleblowers, or relators, to unearth information the federal government may not have discovered on its own. But once a...
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