Omni Surgical L.P., doing business as Spine 360, a
manufacturer of devices used in spinal surgery, and Dr. Jamie Gottlieb, an
Indiana spinal surgeon, have agreed to pay $2.6 million to the United States to
settle allegations that Spine 360 paid illegal kickbacks to Gottlieb to induce
him to use the company’s products. Spine 360 is based in Austin, Texas.
“The Department of Justice has longstanding concerns about
improper financial relationships between health care providers and their
referral sources, because such relationships can alter a physician’s judgment
about the patient's true health care needs and drive up health care costs for
everybody,” said Assistant Attorney General Stuart F. Delery for the Justice
Department’s Civil Division. “In addition to yielding a recovery for
taxpayers, this settlement should deter similar conduct in the future and help
make health care more affordable.”
The Anti-Kickback Statute restricts the financial
relationships that medical device manufacturers may have with doctors who use
or prescribe their products. It is intended to ensure that a physician’s
medical judgment is not compromised by improper financial incentives and is
instead based upon the best interests of the patient.
The settlement announced today involved payments that Spine
360 made between 2007 and 2009 to an entity controlled by Gottlieb.
Although the payments were purportedly made pursuant to a series of
intellectual property agreements, the United States contended that those
agreements were shams, and that the payments were intended to compensate
Gottlieb for using Spine 360 products in his surgeries.
This settlement illustrates the government’s emphasis on
combating health care fraud and marks another achievement for the Health Care
Fraud Prevention and Enforcement Action Team (HEAT) initiative, which was
announced in May 2009 by the Attorney General and the Secretary of Health and
Human Services. The partnership between the two departments has focused
efforts to reduce and prevent Medicare and Medicaid financial fraud through
enhanced cooperation. One of the most powerful tools in this effort is
the False Claims Act. Since January 2009, the Justice Department has
recovered a total of more than $22.4 billion through False Claims Act cases,
with more than $14.2 billion of that amount recovered in cases involving fraud
against federal health care programs.
The case was handled by the Commercial Litigation Branch of
the department’s Civil Division , the U.S. Attorney’s Office for the Northern
District of Indiana and the U.S. Department of Health and Human Services-Office
of Inspector General. The claims settled by this agreement are
allegations only, and there has been no determination of liability.
