A settlement has been reached in a whistleblower class action lawsuit brought against Steven J. Wasserman, MD, a dermatologist practicing in Venice, FL. He is accused of accepting illegal kickbacks from a pathology laboratory and by billing the Medicare program for medically unnecessary services.
The whistleblower will receive $4,046,000 of the settlement.
The federal government's complaint stemmed from an initial whistleblower case that was filed in April 2004. The United States alleged that in or around 1997, Dr. Wasserman entered into an illegal kickback arrangement with Tampa Pathology Laboratory (TPL), a clinical laboratory in Tampa, Fla., and Dr. José SuarezHoyos, a pathologist and the owner of TPL, in an effort to increase the lab’s referral business. Under that agreement, Dr. Wasserman allegedly sent biopsy specimens for Medicare beneficiaries to TPL for testing and diagnosis. In return, TPL allegedly provided Dr. Wasserman a diagnosis on a pathology report that included a signature line for Dr. Wasserman to make it appear to Medicare that he had performed the diagnostic work that TPL had performed. The government alleged that Dr. Wasserman then billed the Medicare program for TPL’s work, passing it off as his own, for which he received more than $6 million in Medicare payments. In addition, the government asserted that, in furtherance of his agreement with TPL, Dr. Wasserman substantially increased the number of skin biopsies he performed on Medicare patients, thus increasing the referral business for TPL.
The government further alleged that, in addition to his involvement in the alleged kickback scheme, Dr. Wasserman also performed thousands of unnecessary skin surgeries known as adjacent tissue transfers on Medicare beneficiaries. Adjacent tissue transfers are complicated and often time-consuming procedures physicians sometimes use to close a defect resulting from the removal of a growth on a patient’s skin. The government alleged that Dr. Wasserman performed many of these procedures in order to obtain the reimbursement for them, and not because they were medically necessary.
