by Ben Vernia | April 17th, 2014
On April 14, the Department of Justice announced that a Kansas cancer clinic and the physician who owns it had agreed to settle claims – originally brought by a whistleblower – that the clinic submitted false claims to federal health care programs. According to DOJ’s press release:
Hope Cancer Institute, a cancer treatment facility in Kansas, and Dr. Raj Sadasivan, the owner of Hope Cancer Institute, have agreed to pay $2.9 million to resolve allegations that they violated the False Claims Act by submitting claims to Medicare, Medicaid and the Federal Employee Health Benefits Program for drugs and services that were not provided to beneficiaries, the Department of Justice announced today.
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The settlement resolves allegations that, between 2007 and 2011, Sadasivan and Hope Cancer Institute submitted claims to federal health benefit programs for the chemotherapy drugs Rituxan, Avastin and Taxotere that were not provided to federal health care beneficiaries. Sadasivan allegedly instructed the employees of Hope Cancer Institute to bill for a predetermined amount of cancer drugs at certain dosage levels, when lower dosages of these drugs were actually provided to beneficiaries. As a result of these instructions, Hope Cancer Institute submitted inflated claims to federal health care programs for drugs that were not actually provided to patients.
The case was filed as a qui tam suit by three former employees of the clinic, but the government did not announce what share of the settlement the relators would receive.
