Keller Grover LLP represents Julie A. Macias in a False Claims Act case pending in the United States District Court for the Central District of California. Macias alleges in her complaint that the Defendants, including her former employer, Los Angeles Metropolitan Medical Center, engaged in a fraudulent scheme to use improper psychiatric holds and an unlawful kickback arrangement to bill Medicare and Medicare for the patients’ supposed care and treatment.  Macias is a registered nurse who had been employed by Los Angeles Metropolitan Medical Center as a Psychiatric Evaluator certified to initiate psychiatric holds pursuant to California Welfare & Institutions Code § 5150.  Macias alleges that the scheme involved not just her former employer, the hospital where the patients were held in locked psychiatric wards, but also doctors at the hospital, marketers who coordinated bringing the patients to the hospital, and an ambulance company that arranged to transport the patients between the facilities where the patients lived and the hospital.  Originally filed in February 2012, the case is United States ex rel Julie A. Macias v. Pacific Health Corporation, et al., Case No. 12-CV-960 RSWL (SHx).
Relevant Pleadings:
•    Amended Complaint

• Default Judgment against PHC for retaliation against Relator

Read the story in the Orange County Register about this case.

 

Keller Grover LLP represents Stephen Krahling and Joan Wlochowski in a False Claims Act case originally filed in 2010 and now pending in the United States District Court for the Eastern District of Pennsylvania, United States ex rel. Krahling and Wlochowski v. Merck & Co., Case No. 10-cv-4374.  Krahling and Wlochowski allege in their complaint that their former employer, Merck & Co., defrauded the government for more than a decade in an ongoing scheme to sell the government a mumps vaccine that is mislabeled, misbranded, adulterated and falsely certified as having an efficacy rate that is significantly higher than it actually is.  The federal government purchases more than half of all vaccines sold in the United States, including the mumps vaccine.  While the United States declined to intervene, it  filed a Statement of Interest in response to Merck’s motion to dismiss making clear the government has “a strong interest in the outcome, even though it has not intervened in the case.”  The government appeared at the hearing on Merck’s motion along with counsel for Krahling and Wlochowski and emphasized its position for the Court.  Merck’s motion to dismiss was subsequently denied.

Relevant Pleadings:

•    Amended Complaint
•    Statement of Interest of the United States Government
•    Order Denying Merck’s Motion to Dismiss

Read the story in the Wall Street Journal about this case.