A settlement has been reached in a whistleblower class action lawsuit brought against Robert Wood Johnson University Hospital Hamilton fraudulently inflating its charges to Medicare.
Whistleblowers that filed two lawsuits that these allegations are based upon will receive $1,111,250 of the total recovery.
The first of the lawsuits was filed in November 2002. The United States alleged that the hospital inflated its charges to obtain supplemental outlier payments for cases that were not extraordinarily costly and for which outlier payments should not have been paid. The United States intervened in both lawsuits in January 2008.
In addition to its standard payment system, Medicare provides supplemental reimbursement, called "outlier payments," to hospitals and other health care providers in cases where the cost of care is unusually high. Congress enacted the supplemental outlier payments system to ensure that hospitals have the incentive to treat inpatients whose care requires unusually high costs.
