fraud charges news from FierceHealthcare

Former City of Angels hospital exec Rudra Sabaratnam has pleaded guilty to a scam to defraud Medicare and Medicaid. The scam involved Sabaratnam paying kickbacks for homeless people recruited as... Read more...

A man operating a health assessment center on Los Angeles's Skid Row has formally denied charges that he took kickbacks from three metro LA hospitals to locate homeless people for needless treatment.... Read more...

A federal court has dismissed a whistleblower suit against Iasis Healthcare, alleging that the company allowed doctors to perform unnecessary medical procedures and paid doctors for patient... Read more...

Blue Cross and Blue Shield of Rhode Island will pay $20 million to avoid prosecution for the conduct of former executives who directed funds to companies run by state officials. As part of the deal,... Read more...

Picking up a single 41-bed hospital usually isn't a big deal for a hospital chain the size of Tenet. But in this case, its acquisition of Hardeeville, S.C.-based Coastal Carolina Medical Center is a significant move, as it's Tenet's first acquisition in five years after years of focusing on existing properties. Executives with Tenet say the $35 million acquisition is a significant step for the company, which has been in turnaround mode for four years.

Tenet is only …

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It's the end of the line for high-profile healthcare exec Richard Scrushy, who was sentenced to almost seven years in prison yesterday for his conviction on federal bribery charges. Scrushy, who now runs a church out of a television studio, continues to deny wrongdoing.

Unlike peers involved in similar scandals at Enron, WorldCom and Tyco, Scrushy actually managed to …

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A former division chair at UT Southwestern Medical Center is suing the academic medical center under the Texas whistleblower act, contending that it booted him from his endowed position after he complained that patients weren't getting proper care at its teaching hospital. In the suit, Dr. Larry Gentilello contends that trauma residents and Parkland Memorial Hospital have been performing surgery without proper supervision on the poor and uninsured patients typically seen at the county …

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The University of Medicine and Dentistry of New Jersey (UMDNJ) has seen another top administrator leave in the wake of ongoing questions over alleged financial fraud. A week before he was due to retire, associate dean for academic and student affairs Paul Mehne has been relieved of his duties and placed on paid administrative leave amidst yet another investigation into the school's purported financial misdealings. Early last year, New Jersey Governor Jon Corzine dismissed the school's …

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New Jersey's Raritan Bay Medical Center has agreed to pay the U.S. Department of Justice $7.5 million to settle Medicare fraud charges, settling three lawsuits filed by whistleblowers under the federal False Claims Act. The suits had charged that from early 1998 through mid- 2003, the system's 338-bed Perth Amboy, NJ hospital deliberately inflated many inpatient and outpatient charges to make them look like outliers, generating extra reimbursement it wasn't entitled to receive. As part of …

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> A former systems administrator with Medco Health Systems has been indicted on fraud charges after he admitted setting up "logic bomb" software that could have deleted prescription information for 60 million patients. Article

> The FDA may soon require manufacturers of several common over-the-counter painkillers to highlight potential risks on their labels. …

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