Olhausen v. Arriva Medical, LLC, U.S., No. 22-374, 6/30/23
Attorneys Kevin Neal and Ken Ralston represent the whistleblower in this False Claims Act case, obtaining a major victory before the U.S. Supreme Court.
On June 30, 2023, the Supreme Court granted our request to review our client’s False Claims Act (FCA) suit alleging that Abbott Laboratories Inc., Arriva Medical LLC, and Alere Inc. improperly billed Medicare for diabetic testing supplies. The Supreme Court overturned the U.S. Court of Appeals for the Eleventh Circuit decision in favor of our client and remanded the case to that appeals court.
This case arose in 2018 when our client, a former employee of Arriva, brought a qui tam suit in the U.S. District Court for the Southern District of Florida alleging that the companies were violating the False Claims Act and defrauding Medicare by sending unnecessary and duplicative supplies to patients without valid prescriptions or signed patient forms. The suit stated that, if not for Arriva’s fraudulent Medicare billing practices, Medicare would not have paid for the supplies Arriva sent to its beneficiaries, totaling upwards of $100 million.
In August 2020, the District Court dismissed the case on a technical issue. On behalf of our client, we filed an appeal in the Eleventh Circuit, which ruled that the companies did not knowingly submit false claims to the government. We asserted that the Eleventh Circuit improperly concluded that the complaint did not satisfy the scienter standard in the FCA and requested the Supreme Court resolve the circuit split. The Supreme Court agreed and remanded the case to the Eleventh Circuit.
Gallagher & Kennedy has partnered with Podhurst Orseck, P.A., a litigation and appellate firm in Miami Florida in this case.
View the recent press coverage on this case from Bloomberg Law reporter Daniel Seiden.