Document Type

Working Paper

Publication Date

3-16-2016

SSRN Discipline

Economics Research Network; Legal Scholarship Network; Social Insurance Research Network; Law & Society eJournals; Law & Society: Public Law eJournals; LSN Subject Matter eJournals; LSN Conferences & Meetings; Financial Economics Network; Health Economics Network; Health Law eJournals

Abstract

Once a humble beloved charitybased arm of the healthcare industry hospice is now a multibillion dollar industry funded almost exclusively by Medicare run by forprofit corporations answering to private equity investors and Wall Street and more and more frequently plagued by fraud and abuse This article gathers together for the first time in one place all of the publiclyavailable data related to law enforcement and regulatory enforcement of the Medicare Hospice Benefit The author a wellknown qui tam practitioner and False Claims Act scholar outlines the history and regulatory scheme of the Medicare Hospice Benefit and its payment provisions the history and statutory scheme of the False Claims Act and its whistleblower provisions with particular emphasis on its use in the hospice fraud context the relevant case law and the joint efforts of whistleblowers and federal law enforcement attorneys and agents in ferreting out hospice fraud The article includes in depth descriptions of representative cases as well as an exhaustive appendix which gathers information from crossreferenced sources and summarizes every publiclyavailable civil and criminal Medicare hospice fraud investigation

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