The good, reassuring news about that “old dog” fraud and abuse as it enters an age of payment reform is that criminal liability for fraud still requires a specific intent to defraud the federal health care programs, anti-kickback liability still requires actual knowledge of at least the wrongfulness, if not the illegality, of the financial transaction with a referral source, and civil False Claims Act liability for Stark Law violations still requires actual knowledge, a reckless disregard for, or deliberate ignorance of the Stark Law violation. This should mean that good faith and diligent efforts to comply with law, including seeking and following legal counsel, still go a long way in managing an organization’s and individual executive’s risk under the fraud and abuse laws. The bad, unsettling news about fraud and abuse in an age of payment reform, however, is that (1) anxiety about reform and stagnating and declining physician incomes are propelling a spike in transactions between health systems and physicians at a time when qui tam plaintiffs and the law firms that represent them are aggressively challenging the legitimacy and common structures for these transactions; and (2) the Stark Law is largely indifferent to the good faith intentions of health systems to integrate and enter into coordinated care arrangements with physicians, and continues to impose on health systems heavy burdens of proof that the arrangements comply with ambiguous standards like fair market value, volume or value and commercial reasonableness. While financial transactions incident to the Centers for Medicare and Medicaid Services’ (CMS) innovative care delivery and payment initiatives, such as accountable care organizations (ACOs), medical homes and bundled payment arrangements can be protected by the fraud and abuse/Stark waivers discussed in Part B below, there are many other common transactions and arrangements with physicians still operating in a fee-for-service environment (such as practice acquisitions, employment, “gainsharing,” service line co-management, pay-for-quality and non-ACO clinically integrated networks) that are not protected by the waivers. During this period of transition to transformation of the health delivery and payment system, the key areas of risk for health systems are their burdens of proof on the ‘big three” issues of:
- Fair market value,
- Volume or value, and
- Commercial reasonableness.
Each is discussed separately below, and the industry practices for managing these risks. Please note that none of these practices are necessarily “best” or “normative” practices, but are what we have observed.
Read the full article here.
