NASHVILLE – The United States today filed a complaint in intervention alleging violations of the False Claims Act (FCA) and the Anti-Kickback Statute (AKS) by Methodist Le Bonheur Healthcare (MLH) and Methodist Healthcare Memphis Hospitals (collectively, Methodist), for paying unlawful kickbacks to West Clinic, P.C. (West) in exchange for West’s patient referrals, announced U.S. Attorney Mark H. Wildasin for the Middle District of Tennessee.
The government began investigating the wrongdoing alleged in today’s complaint in response to a lawsuit filed under the qui tam, or whistleblower, provisions of the False Claims Act, which allows private citizens with knowledge of false claims to bring civil suits on behalf of the government and to share in any recovery. The qui tam action was initially filed on May 30, 2017, by Jeffrey H. Liebman, the former President of Methodist University Hospital. In December 2019, David M. Stern, M.D., the former Executive Dean and Vice Chancellor at the University of Tennessee Health Sciences Center, who served on the Board of Directors of MLH from 2011 to 2017, joined the lawsuit. Stern was also a member of the Executive Cancer Council and the Steering Committee for the West Cancer Center.
The complaint sets forth in detail the unlawful kickbacks, disguised through a sophisticated business integration wherein Methodist purchased substantially all of the outpatient locations of the largest oncology practice in the Memphis area, owned by West. At...
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...