Even after reportedly negotiating a $250 million settlement with the federal government for unnecessary drug tests dating back to 2012, Millennium Health's legal woes appear to be far from over.
Now, the health insurer Humana is seeking monetary damages from the nation's largest drug-testing laboratory, according to BloombergBusiness. The claims, filed through a demand for arbitration in May, are also tied to unlawful insurance claims made by Millennium.
To make matters worse, Millennium is also being criticized for failing to disclose the fact that federal authorities were investigating potential drug testing overpayments when applying for a $1.78 billion loan with JPMorgan Chase and Co. A Bloomberg analysis shows that the loan's value sunk to 43 cents on the dollar after the company disclosed the possibility of "potential commercial settlement payments" to lenders last week.
Neither Millennium nor Humana provided comments to Bloomberg regarding possible litigation.
In June, reports surfaced that Millennium was preparing to ink a multimillion-dollar settlement with the government after billing Medicare and Medicaid for high-priced drug tests. The announcement followed a wave of laboratory fraud enforcement that has focused on the relationship between labs and physicians, as well as a $50 million settlement that Health Diagnostics Laboratory entered with the federal government for paying fees to physicians in exchange for blood samples. Meanwhile, guilty pleas continue to roll in after federal investigators uncovered a $200 million fraud scheme executed by Biodiagnostic Laboratory Services Inc.
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