New Article: “Life, Death and Medicare Fraud: The Corruption of Hospice…”

Georgetown University’s American Criminal Law Review recently hosted a symposium on health care fraud and one of the articles to come out of that program is by University of Alabama Law School Adjunct Professor James F. Barger, Jr. His article uses the 2013 criminal case of U.S. v. Kolodesh, which resulted in a “guilty verdict on all thirty five counts,” to examine “the general trend of Medicare Hospice fraud enforcement actions.”   The author reports:

The vast majority of False Claims Act hospice cases in which the United States has intervened have settled in favor of the United States without consideration by a jury, and every criminal hospice fraud prosecution by the United States to date has resulted in a guilty plea or a conviction by jury. Every such case—whether civil or criminal—was initiated by a whistleblower under the public-private partnership of the False Claims Act.

 

The FCA’s whistleblower provisions have been highly effective at detecting fraud and recovering misappropriated Medicare dollars, but deterrence and prevention remain unattained goals.

 

The calculated business decision to settle False Claims Act allegations has proven over time to have a neutral-to-positive effect on corporate profitability in the hospice sector. For-profit hospice giants such as SouthernCare and Odyssey, who have paid eight figure settlements, have rebounded quickly and actually gained position over their competitors…..

 

Nevertheless, while the whistleblower provisions of the False Claims Act have proven extremely effective at discovering hospice fraud and at recovering at least some of the lost Medicare funds, alone the statute has demonstrated very little deterrent effect. Outside of a legislative overhaul of the Medicare Hospice Benefit, the only effective deterrent scheme will be for enforcement officials to supplement their use of the civil False Claims Act with traditional criminal fraud statutes. For this to work, however, criminal penalties must be imposed not only on the relatively small-scale players, like Matthew Kolodesh and Home Care Hospice, but also on the mega hospice companies and their executives and owners.

For more, read “Life, Death and Medicare Fraud: The Corruption of Hospice and What the Private Public Partnership Under the Federal False Claims Act is Doing About It,“ published in the 2016 issue of the American Criminal Law Review.