For four years in a row, the Department of Justice has recovered more than $2 billion in healthcare fraud whistle-blower cases, the department announced late last week. In 2013, $2.6 billion of the $3.8 billion the DOJ recovered under the False Claims Act were related to healthcare fraud.
The year’s largest healthcare fraud recoveries, said the DOJ in a press release, were in the pharmaceutical and medical device industries. $1.8 billion was collected from these industries for fraud against federal healthcare programs, such as Medicare and Medicaid, and an additional $443 million was recovered for state Medicaid programs.
[See also: Fraud recoveries on the rise]
Many of the settlements in pharmaceutical cases were for off-label marketing of drugs. Abbott Laboratories, for example, paid $1.5 billion to settle allegations that it illegally promoted Depakote for off-label treatment of agitation and aggression in dementia patients and schizophrenics.
The Justice Department attributed the recoveries in healthcare to the Obama administration making healthcare fraud a high priority.
Overall, 2013’s recoveries in whistle-blower lawsuits total the second largest in the history of such suits and make up nearly half of recoveries since the False Claims Act was amended in 1986, the DOJ said in its press release. Total recoveries under the act since January 2009 total $17 billion.