The U.S. Supreme Court on Friday ruled that the Department of Justice could unilaterally dismiss a whistleblower lawsuit against companies, using a suit against a UnitedHealth Group Inc. subsidiary as a test case.
Reuters has a report on the 8-1 ruling, written by Justice Elena Kagan, that upheld a lower court's decision that the Justice Department acted within its power when it dismissed a lawsuit against Executive Health Resources, a unit of Minnetonka-based UnitedHealth (NYSE: UNH).
"Today, we hold that the government may seek dismissal of an FCA action over a relator’s objection so long as it intervened sometime in the litigation, whether at the outset or afterward," the decision reads. (You can read the full decision here.)
Executive Health Resources, which provides medical necessity compliance and physician medical management services, was bought by UnitedHealth in 2010 for a reported $1.5 billion.
In 2012, former employee Jesse Polansky sued the company under the False Claims Act, accusing the unit of defrauding Medicare by falsely certifying that hospital admissions were necessary. Executive Health Resources denied wrongdoing.
In about 20% of False Claims Act cases, the government takes over the whistleblower case itself — and although those instances are in the minority, they account for the vast majority of actual damages awarded. Starting in 2018, the Justice Department began seeking to dismiss cases it didn't back. In 2019, it moved to dismiss Polansky's...
A post claiming to list all the actions taken by the Home Minister in Kashmir in the last 10 days is going viral on social media. The posts list out 18 points, which include claims regarding citiz...