Kindred Healthcare Inc. will pay $125 million to settle federal allegations that it provided unnecessary therapy services to nursing-home patients as part of a scheme to overbill Medicare, according to the agreement finalized on Tuesday, The Wall Street Journal reported.
The paper also reported that “Several nursing homes that hired Kindred’s therapy unit, RehabCare, to provide services to their residents separately agreed to pay the federal government about $8 million for their role in the alleged scheme.”
Kindred said it agreed to the settlement to avoid costly and distracting litigation, but denied wrongdoing.
The WSJ noted in this week’s story that last August it reported on how “Kindred and other nursing-home operators and contractors increased the share of days they billed for giving patients’ the highest therapy level Medicare will cover—so-called ultrahigh therapy. In 2013, Kindred’s own nursing homes billed for ultrahigh therapy 58 percent of the time, compared with 7.6 percent of the time in 2002.”
