Estate of late doctor, Lubbock UMC deny fraud allegations, agree to pay nearly $3.3M settlement
UMC Physicians and the estate of a Lubbock doctor who died last February in a plane crash have agreed to pay nearly $3.3 million to the federal and state government to settle allegations Rice submitted false Medicaid and Medicare claims.
The estate of Dr. Kenneth Michael Rice, who was 60 at the time of the single-engine plane crash in southeast Lubbock, agreed to pay $2 million and UMC Physicians agreed to pay $1,280,000 to the United States and to the State of Texas to settle the matter, according to an announcement from the U.S. District Attorney’s Office for the Northern District of Texas.
UMC Health System and UMC Physicians, a physician practice management group located in Lubbock, sent a statement to A-J Media Monday afternoon thanking the federal and state government for working with them to resolve reimbursement matters related to Rice’s medical practice.
“The issues do not involve the quality of the care patients received. Rather, the issues concern how medical services were documented, coded and billed to Medicare and Medicaid,” the UMC statement says. “We have implemented additional processes to assure compliance with complex regulations, including improved monitoring and increased training efforts.”
Read more: http://lubbockonline.com/filed-online/2016-08-08/estate-late-doctor-umc-deny-fraud-allegations-agree-pay-nearly-33-million#
