The District Court for the Central District of California has given a mixed response to motions to dismiss a declined FCA suit against Providence Health & Services and associated parties. The suit alleges an scheme in which the defendants trained doctors to describe medical conditions with language that would support inflated Medicare reimbursements.
At issue is whether the public disclosure bar applies. The suit draws upon information from several sources, including Medicare claims data, reports by the HHS Office of Inspector General, and information from online sources. The court agreed with the motion to dismiss about the first two sources, saying they qualified as “federal reports” and were therefore “public disclosures”.
Determining whether the online sources qualified as “news media” – as argued by a motion to dismiss – was a more difficult question, however. The court identified goalposts for that determination, including the source’s reportage of recent events, editorial independence, wide dissemination, and traditional understandings of the term. However, the court said it did not have sufficient information to decide, and declined the motion to dismiss on those grounds.
