The US Supreme Court revived Friday a whistleblower’s False Claims Act suit alleging that Abbott Laboratories Inc., Arriva Medical LLC, and Alere Inc. improperly billed Medicare for diabetic testing supplies.
The Court granted the whistleblower’s petition for writ of certiorari, vacated the judgment of the US Court of Appeals for the Eleventh Circuit, and remanded the case to that appeals court.
This decision follows the Supreme Court’s June 1 opinion in United States ex rel. Schutte v. SuperValu Inc., which said the scienter element under the FCA can be established if a defendant believes its claims are false.
The FCA’s scienter element refers to a defendant’s knowledge and subjective beliefs, not what an objectively reasonable person may have known or believed, Justice Clarence Thomas wrote in a unanimous opinion.
The US Court of Appeals for the Eleventh Circuit ruled in April 2022 that Troy Olhausen didn’t show that the companies knowingly submitted false statements to the government. The Medicare rules he alleged the defendants violated are susceptible to multiple reasonable interpretations, the appeals court said.
According to Olhausen’s petition, the Eleventh Circuit improperly concluded that the complaint didn’t satisfy the scienter standard in the FCA.
The appeals court took an anti-textual approach by allowing defendants that knowingly defrauded the...
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