By Nate Raymond
(Reuters) -The U.S. Supreme Court on Friday preserved the Justice Department's power to unilaterally dismiss lawsuits filed under a law that lets whistleblowers sue businesses on behalf of the government to recover taxpayer money paid to companies based on false claims in exchange for a portion of any recovery.
The 8-1 ruling, written by liberal Justice Elena Kagan, upheld a lower court's decision to allow the Justice Department to toss a lawsuit against a UnitedHealth Group Inc unit by a former employee named Jesse Polansky who accused it of wrongdoing.
Polansky had sought to bar the department from dismissing whistleblower lawsuits filed under the False Claims Act in instances in which the government initially declined to exercise its right to take over the cases.
The Philadelphia-based 3rd U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals upheld the dismissal of Polansky's 2012 lawsuit that had accused UnitedHealth's Executive Health Resources unit of defrauding Medicare, the government health insurance program for people ages 65 and older, by falsely certifying hospital admissions as medically necessary.
"Today, we hold that the government may seek dismissal of an FCA (False Claims Act) action over a relator's objection so long as it intervened sometime in the litigation, whether at the outset or afterward," Kagan wrote.
Conservative Justice Clarence Thomas dissented.
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