Whistleblower lawsuit alleges Florida Hospital filed millions in false claims
It is apparently not a good time to need health care in the state of Florida.
A few days ago, The New York Times reported that doctors at the HCA hospital chain had performed unnecessary heart procedures on patients whose problems weren’t severe enough to need them, resulting in several people nearly dying.
Now, Marni Jameson reports for the Orlando Sentinel about some shady accounting at the Florida Hospital branch in Orlando:
A whistle-blower lawsuit based on insider information from a former Florida Hospital Orlando billing employee and a staff physician alleges that seven Adventist Health hospitals in Central Florida have overbilled the federal government for tens of millions of dollars in false or padded medical claims.
The suit claims Florida Hospital used improper coding for more than a decade to overbill Medicare, Medicaid and Tricare, all federal government payors. In addition, it alleges, the hospital commonly overbilled for a drug used, for example, in MRI scans and billed for computer analyses that were never performed.
Nooooooot good.