Quote:
Originally posted by Hank Chinaski
wow. it sounds like she was want to prosecute cases where there was little more than a personal grudge to motivate her. and you say she didn't even get the conviction?
edit: my post is snotty, but not directed at RT.
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I don't know about that. The case arose because a doc who was getting prosecuted for every day run of the mill Medicare fraud said "yeah, well, they paid me exorbitantly high bribes in the form of physician recruitment agreements. You should go after them." He became the government's star witness.
None of the other hospitals in the area were doing these agreements (mainly because they were closed system hospitals like Kaiser and Scripps, so they had direct employment agreements with docs instead). And the money that changed hands from the hospital to the docs was a lot.
It was a fairly shocking case for those of us in the health care biz, but then lately, there have been more and more criminal prosecutions when in the past CMPs and CIAs would have done.
I don't think, necessarily, that it was a bad idea to go after Tenet. But certainly a lot of people do. The government did ultimately net just short of a billion dollars out of the investigation, and certainly the OIG (an independent federal government agency) was all in favor of the AUSA's actions.
I just think that maybe the Alvarado case along with the Cunningham case had Lam on the radar in Washington.
