Business
Tenet settles Florida suit
NEWS IN BRIEF — Posted March 13, 2006
Tenet Healthcare Corp. has agreed to pay $7 million to settle a civil racketeering lawsuit brought by Florida's attorney general over the way its hospitals billed Medicare.
Under the agreement, the Dallas-based hospital operator will pay about $4 million to establish a fund to pay for indigent and uninsured care at 13 county hospital districts and systems, Tenet said. Another $3 million will go to the Florida Medicaid Fraud Control Unit and public hospitals in the state.
The lawsuit, filed last year, accused Tenet of falsely inflating its prices to collect more than $1 billion from a shared Medicare fund for outlier reimbursements. It also said Tenet prevented Florida community hospitals from collecting millions of dollars in reimbursements that would have been otherwise due to them.
The settlement also ends investigations brought by the Florida Medicaid Fraud Control Unit into certain Medicaid payments and billings, the company said. But Tenet said it did not admit any guilt under the terms of the agreement.
In 2003, Tenet voluntarily changed its Medicare outlier billing policy in the wake of a federal investigation into its practices.
Note: This item originally appeared at http://www.ama-assn.org/amednews/2006/03/13/bibf0313.htm.
