Criminal Liability of Health Care Providers

Some types of criminal prosecutions of health care providers are rare, while others are not.

1. Not-so-rare. This category includes fraud (against private insurers and public health programs like Medicare, Medicare, and Tricare); criminal prosecutions involving violations of the Anti-Kickback Law are announced by DOJ and state AGs every week (if not every day). Last Friday, for example, the Massachusetts Attorney General announced indictments against a dentist and his dental practice for billing the Medicaid program for services that were never rendered or were not rendered by the dentist. The charges included multiple counts of Medicaid False Claims and Larceny Over $1,200. 

Violations of state and federal Controlled Substances Acts often have a provider -- a physician, nurse, or pharmacy worker -- with access to drugs in the middle of the scheme. A recent example comes from the U.S. Attorney for the Northern District of New York. whose office announced on March 1 that a nurse practitioner received a 70-month sentence "for distributing controlled substances outside the course of professional practice and for no legitimate medical purpose." In her plea agreement, the defendant admitted that she 

unlawfully prescribed controlled substances to a total of 54 patients.  Simonson issued hundreds of unlawful prescriptions, including for the opioids hydrocodone and oxycodone, benzodiazepines (clonazepam, diazepam, and lorazepam), and the stimulants amphetamine (e.g. Adderall) and methylphenidate.  For instance, Simonson admitted that she issued a total of 63 oxycodone prescriptions to two residents of Suffolk County, New York, without treating either of them for a medical condition. The Suffolk County residents usually paid Simonson by mailing her packages of cash concealed within DVD cases.

To settle the government's civil case against her, the defendant "admitted that she improperly prescribed controlled substances to 105 patients (including the 54 listed in her criminal plea agreement), often without ever examining patients and maintaining medical records justifying her decision to prescribe controlled substances."

2. Very rare. This category involves provider errors that result in iatrogenic injury. Most such cases, of course, are handled on the civil side by medical-malpractice and medical-negligence claims. In a small percentage of cases, though, a provider will be indicted. Most such cases involve extreme departures from the standard of care resulting in a patient's death. An example was reported by the NY Times earlier this month:

A Colorado paramedic convicted in the 2019 death of Elijah McClain, a young Black man whose case helped drive the national police reform movement, was sentenced on Friday to five years in prison.

The case was a rare criminal prosecution of emergency medical personnel, and stirred outrage among paramedics and firefighters across the nation who worry that urgent decisions made as part of their jobs can be criminalized.

The paramedic, Peter Cichuniec, 51, a former lieutenant with Aurora Fire Rescue, was convicted in December of criminally negligent homicide and second-degree assault for the unlawful administration of drugs. He was one of five police officers and paramedics prosecuted in state district court over three consecutive trials. . . .

In August 2019, Mr. McClain, a 23-year-old massage therapist, was returning home from a store when he was confronted by police who were responding to a 911 call about a suspicious person. During a quickly escalating encounter, Mr. McClain was forcefully restrained by police and placed in a carotid chokehold, a neck restraint that has since been banned in Aurora and other police departments. Paramedics then injected him with an overdose of the powerful sedative ketamine. He died in a hospital several days later.

SCOTUS Agrees to Review Proposed Opioid Settlement

From Bloomberg's USLW email teaser:

The US Supreme Court agreed to consider scuttling Purdue Pharma LP’s $6 billion opioid settlement, taking up a Biden administration appeal that contends the accord improperly shields the Sackler family members who own the company.

High court review threatens Purdue Pharma’s bankruptcy reorganization plan, which includes the opioid settlement as well as an agreement by the Sacklers to give up ownership of the company.

The plan would end a mountain of litigation against the OxyContin maker and funnel billions of dollars toward efforts to abate the opioid crisis. Family members have agreed to pay as much as $6 billion to those suing.

The high court also halted implementation of the settlement while the justices consider the case. The court said it will hear arguments in December.

See also CNN.

The Justice Department had multiple objections to the proposed settlement, the central one of which was included in the Supreme Court's order granting certiorari today:

Application (23A87) granted by the Court. The application for stay presented to Justice Sotomayor and by her referred to the Court is granted. The mandate of the United States Court of Appeals for the Second Circuit in case No. 22-110 and the consolidated cases is recalled and stayed. Applicant suggested this Court treat the application as a petition for a writ of certiorari; doing so, the petition is granted. The parties are directed to brief and argue the following question: Whether the Bankruptcy Code authorizes a court to approve, as part of a plan of reorganization under Chapter 11 of the Bankruptcy Code, a release that extinguishes claims held by nondebtors against nondebtor third parties, without the claimants’ consent. The Clerk is directed to establish a briefing schedule that will allow the case to be argued in the December 2023 argument session. The stay shall terminate upon the sending down of the judgment of this Court. (emphasis added)

As the Justice Department put it in their request to the Court for a stay of enforcement of the settlement:

Until recently, Purdue was controlled by members of the Raymond and Mortimer Sackler families.  Members of those families, who withdrew approximately $11 billion from Purdue in the eleven years before the company filed for bankruptcy, App., infra, 19a, have now agreed to contribute up to $6 billion to fund Purdue’s reorganization plan, id. at 40a, but only on the condition that the Sacklers and a host of other individuals and entities -- who have not themselves sought bankruptcy protection -- receive a release from liability that is of exceptional and unprecedented breadth.  The plan’s release “absolutely, unconditionally, irrevocably, fully, finally, forever[,] and permanently release[s]” the Sacklers from every conceivable type of opioid-related civil claim -- even claims based on fraud and other forms of willful misconduct that could not be discharged if the Sacklers filed for bankruptcy in their individual capacities.  Id. at 25a (quoting C.A. SPA 920). 

 

The Sackler release extinguishes the claims of all opioid claimants except the United States, and therefore applies to an untold number of claimants who did not specifically consent to the release’s terms. The Sackler release is not authorized by the Bankruptcy Code, constitutes an abuse of the bankruptcy system, and raises serious constitutional questions by extinguishing without consent the property rights of nondebtors against individuals or entities not themselves debtors in bankruptcy.  The Bankruptcy Code grants courts unusual powers specifically authorized by the Constitution for addressing true financial distress.  Allowing the court of appeals’ decision to stand would leave in place a roadmap for wealthy corporations and individuals to misuse the bankruptcy system to avoid mass tort liability.  That is not what Congress enacted the Bankruptcy Code to accomplish.  And if such abuses are permitted, the gamesmanship that is sure to follow will only amplify the harms to victims by redistributing bargaining power to tortfeasors.  

Considering the vast stakes involved in this case, every sentence of that last paragraph will be hotly contested between now and December.

 

SCOTUS Grants Cert. in Three Health Law Cases

From SCOTUSBlog (with additional cites and links):

Ruan and Kahn

In Ruan v. United States (20-1410; opinion below) and Kahn v. United States (21-5261; opinion below) the justices agreed to decide whether a doctor who has the authority to prescribe controlled substances can be convicted for unlawful distribution of those drugs when he reasonably believed that his prescriptions fell within professional norms. The question came to the court in April in the case of Xiulu Ruan, an Alabama doctor who specialized in pain management. The government contended that the doctor had prescribed medicine outside the standard of care – for example, prescribing opioids when physical therapy or a detox facility would have been more appropriate. Ruan countered that he had always acted in good faith, making individual assessments of what each patient needed.

The second case came to the court in July. The doctor in that case, Shakeel Kahn, argued that he did not know that his patients were abusing or selling the medicine that he prescribed for them — primarily opioids. He was sentenced to 25 years in prison. The justices granted both cases and consolidated them for one hour of oral argument.

Marietta Memorial Hospital (20-1641; opinion below)  

The justices also will weigh in on a dispute filed by DaVita, the country’s largest dialysis provider, over the interpretation of the Medicare Secondary Payer Act, which bars health plans from considering whether an individual is eligible for Medicare benefits because they suffer from kidney failure. A health plan also cannot provide different benefits to such individuals than they provide to others covered by the plan. After the U.S. Court of Appeals for the 6th Circuit ruled that the Marietta Memorial Hospital health plan discriminates against patients with kidney failure by providing less coverage for dialysis, the plan came to the Supreme Court, which granted its petition for review on Friday.

Somnolescent state medical boards bear large responsibility for epidemic of opioid death and destruction

400,000 deaths (and counting. Many multiples of that number of lives ruined. A big part of the problem is a regulatory regime that seems not to be up to the task of policing prescription abuses by doctors (and other health care professionals working under their supervision and control). A recent article in the New York Review of Books -- "Licensed to Pill" by Rebecca Haw Allensworth -- starts with the story of a completely ineffectual Tennessee licensing board that allowed a physician involved in a criminal enterprise to push pills. It is a harrowing tale.

Granted, not all medical boards are created equal. Some have been more active than others in disciplining physicians who overprescribe. But the opioid crisis could not have reached the level it has without many boards failing in their responsibility to protect the public from unscrupulous physicians. This is occurring against a background of overregulating physicians who practiced evidence-based medicine to treat patients with medical problems other than addiction to opioids. Many doctors began avoiding pain management altogether because the regulatory environment was too hostile and the legal risk too great. Over time, state legislatures began enacting "intractable pain" laws that were intended to protect legitimate pain-control practices. Somehow, over the past two decades, the regulatory pendulum seems to have swung very farin the opposite direction.