Phillips & Cohen represented Robert McCaslin, a hospital billing department employee, in a qui tam lawsuit against his former employer, Harris County Hospital District of Houston, Texas, for Medicare billing fraud.
Harris County paid $15 million to settle the case, and a portion of that was rewarded to McCaslin. Below is an excerpt from a story by CBS Evening News on McCaslin and the hospital Medicare fraud case.
Meet Medicare Fraud’s Whistleblower
Houston, Feb. 8, 2008
Robert McCaslin is a man of few words … but many scruples.
“Just the way I’m wired, I guess,” he said. “It’s just that simple.”
Which is why he lost sleep over major taxpayer fraud he unearthed while working in billing at the Houston Hospital District, CBS News investigative correspondent Sharyl Attkisson reports.
“It’s an attack on the whole system,” he said. “Everybody that pays taxes it involved in this.”
McCaslin caught the hospital billing Medicare for accident victims, even if the patient had private insurance that was supposed to pay. The hospital also billed Medicare for prisoners, even though by law, they’re not covered.
When McCaslin alerted his bosses, he was surprised to discover they were in on it.
“In one of the meetings with the manager, they said ‘that’s just the way they did it here.’ That was their procedure,” he said.
To read the rest of the story and see the video report about the hospital Medicare fraud whistleblower, go to the CBS Evening News website.
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