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.