Carrie Valiant, a Member of the Firm in the Health Care and Life Sciences practice, in the Washington, DC, office, was quoted in an article titled "Doctors Abusing Medicare Face Fines and Expulsion."
Following is an excerpt:
The Obama administration is cracking down on doctors who repeatedly overcharge Medicare patients, and for the first time in more than 30 years the government may disclose how much is paid to individual doctors treating Medicare patients. ?...
A new section of the Medicare manual encourages the use of fines to penalize doctors who generate a pattern of claims for goods and services that they know or "should know" are not medically necessary. Providers can also be barred from Medicare if they bill the program for "excessive charges" or for services substantially in excess of patients' needs. ?...
Carrie Valiant, a lawyer who represents health care providers, said the new enforcement policy showed what she described as the administration's "propensity to throw providers out of federal health care programs, rather than work with them to correct mistakes" in billings and claims.
In many cases, Ms. Valiant said, federal investigators assert that a service was medically unnecessary when the real problem was that a doctor or a hospital did not adequately document the need for it.
