According to an article by Kent Faulk in Sunday’s Birmingham News, $48 million in healthcare fraud has been recovered from Alabama companies over the past four years. The largest recovery, accounting for more than half the fraud, was through a lawsuit headed by Frohsin & Barger against national hospice provider, SouthernCare Hospice. “That company, which admitted no wrongdoing in its settlement had been accused of fraudulently enrolling elderly people in hospice and charged Medicare for services when the patients were not dying,” says Faulk. According to Assistant United States Attorney Lloyd Peeples, healthcare fraud investigations in north Alabama have doubled over the past five years. But the majority of the healthcare fraud in this country goes either undetected or is simply not prosecuted. If the statistics in Faulk’s article are correct, less than 1% of the actual healthcare fraud is being recovered — and hundreds of billions of dollars are lost annually by some estimates. According to Peeples, whistleblowers may be the key to the solution. “Whistleblowers provide the government with inside information which would either be difficult or time consuming for the government to otherwise obtain,” Peeples said in the Faulk article. Frohsin & Barger represents healthcare whistleblowers, who stand to be rewarded with as much as 25% of the government’s recovery, which can include treble damages, penalties, attorneys’ fees, and costs.

To report healthcare fraud, contact Frohsin & Barger.