(Reuters) - In 2014, hospital operator Community Health Systems Inc agreed to pay nearly $100 million to settle False Claims Act allegations that it overbilled the government for healthcare services. But that wasn't the end of the case. There was still the matter of attorneys' fees -- a fight that has lasted seven years.
CHS’s settlement with the Justice Department resolved seven early stage qui tam lawsuits by private whistleblowers who assisted the government’s investigation into claims that the company charged in-patient rates for services that should have been billed at lower rates for outpatients.
Did lawyers for all of those whistleblowers deserved to be paid for their efforts?
On Tuesday, the 6th U.S Circuit Court of Appeals ruled that they did, in a consolidated appeal of a 2020 trial court decision denying attorneys’ fees to lawyers for whistleblowers whose lawsuits were not the first to be filed against CHS. 6th Circuit judges Karen Moore, Eric Clay and Julia Gibbons concluded that nothing in the language of the False Claims Act or in the specific facts of this case excuses CHS from its obligation to pay attorneys’ fees to whistleblowers (also known, in the FCA context, as relators) who collected a share of the bounty from the government’s settlement.
“The FCA encourages and incentivizes citizens to prevent the defrauding of public funds,” Moore wrote in the unanimous appellate opinion. “If multiple relators uncover multiple independent parts of the same complex...
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