In a recently unsealed lawsuit, two emergency room doctors at HCA’s Mission Health in North Carolina allege that HCA and TeamHealth, the medical staffing company HCA uses at its Mission hospitals, is overcharging patients by running medically unnecessary trauma alerts and tests, such as CT scans, extra blood samples, and X-rays.
The lawsuit argues that HCA and TeamHealth have “systematically defrauded” Medicare and Medicaid.
Last year, Congressman Bill Pascrell (D-N.J.) – then Chair of the House Ways and Means Subcommittee on Oversight, sent a letter to the U.S. Department of Health and Human Services, calling on the agency to investigate HCA’s emergency department admissions practices based on separate allegations of Medicare fraud raised by SEIU in a 2022 report.
According to SEIU’s report, HCA may have netted over $1 billion in fraudulent Medicare payments from over-admitting patients for potentially unnecessary care