Gaetan J. Alfano was mentioned in an article titled, “Court Rejects ‘Close Nexus’ Arbitration Argument in Dispute Between School, Condo Owner.” Published March 14, 2019 in The Legal Intelligencer.
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Pamela Coyle Brecht will be speaking at the 2019 Health Law Institute presented by the Pennsylvania Bar Institute. Ms. Brecht will be on a panel presenting on the False Claims Act Update. The Institute will be on March 12-13, 2019 in Philadelphia, PA. Read More
The National Labor Relations Board (“NLRB”) recently issued two decisions that give companies greater flexibility to discipline employees and classify workers as independent contractors. Alstate Maintenance, LLC, 367 NLRB 68 (2019); SuperShuttle DFW, Inc., 367 NLRB 75 (2019).
In Alstate, the Board rejected a standard that protected broad statements to management in front of colleagues, making it more difficult for employees to successfully claim comments are protected by the National Labor Relations Act (“NLRA”). Now, an employee’s statement is not protected unless the employee brings a truly group complaint or attempts to start group action for mutual aid or protection. The Board rejected the argument that the comment, “we did a similar job a year prior and we didn’t receive a tip for it” was a group complaint simply because it was made in front of coworkers and used the plural pronoun “we.” Rather, because the employer did not control tips, the comment could not be considered as made to management for the workers’ mutual aid or protection.
In SuperShuttle, the NLRB returned to its long-standing broad definition of an independent contractor. The Board reaffirmed a traditional common-law agency test, which focuses on a company’s ability to control a worker’s daily tasks. Going forward, the Board will also examine the entrepreneurial opportunity a position affords a worker as one aspect of determining his or her employment status. The ruling may make it more difficult for workers to unionize because only employees are covered by the NLRA.
Both decisions indicate that the NLRB may continue to relax restrictions on American businesses, including a company’s ability to discipline its employees and classify its workers as it chooses. Employers should be mindful to distinguish between individual complaints, even if made in a group setting, which are not protected, and group actions concerning terms and conditions of employment, which cannot be restricted. Read More
Marc Stephen Raspanti will be co-hosting a webcast called “False Claims Act 2019: Discussion with the Expert – Successful Strategies for False Claims Act and Qui Tam Representations” for the American Law Institute Continuing Legal Education. The webcast will be on February 13, 2019 from 12:30 – 2:30 pm. For more information or to register, click here. Read More
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Marc Stephen Raspanti will be speaking at the American Conference Institute’s 6th Advanced Forum on False Claims & Qui Tam Enforcement. His presentation is titled “From Initiating the Complaint to Government Intervention or Declination and Everything in Between,” given with co-presenter Colleen Kennedy from the United States Attorney’s Office of the Eastern District of California. The program will be held from January 28-29, 2019 at The Park Lane Hotel in New York City. Read More
Marc Stephen Raspanti will be speaking at the Health Care Compliance Association’s 4th Annual Healthcare Enforcement Compliance Conference on “State Enforcement Actions: Where Are They Going in Today’s Enforcement Climate?” The Conference will be held on November 6, 2018 at the Grand Hyatt in Washington, DC. Read More
Last month, the Justice Department announced that Health Management Associates, formerly a U.S. hospital chain headquartered in Naples, Florida, will pay over $260 million to resolve charges that HMA knowingly billed government health care programs for inpatient services that should have been billed as outpatient or observation services, paid remuneration to physicians in return for patient referrals, and submitted inflated claims for emergency department facility fees.
HMA entered into a non prosecution agreement to resolve related criminal charges and an HMA subsidiary plead guilty.
The case was driven by a group of whistleblowers – two of them emergency room doctors in North Carolina and two of them former hospital executives at HMA hospitals in Lancaster, Pennsylvania.
Those whistleblowers were represented by Marc Raspanti, a partner at Pietragallo, Gordon, Alfano, Bosick & Raspanti in Philadelphia along with his law partner Pamela Coyle Brecht.
Raspanti has been a leader in the False Claims Act bar – bringing many high profile cases over the years.
The North Carolina doctors he represented were echoing the complaints of emergency room doctors around the country. This was not an isolated case.
“Most people think that hospitals staff their emergency rooms with their own employees,” Raspanti told Corporate Crime Reporter in an interview last week. “And while that is sometimes the case, most of the time it’s not. When you enter into an emergency room of a large or small hospital, many times they are staffed by independent contractors hired by the hospital to perform 24 hour a day, 7 day a week, 365 days emergency room services. They are extremely lucrative contracts for the emergency room doctor groups. They are particularly lucrative for the large emergency room publicly traded companies. They have contracts all over the country. And often, there are pressures on these doctors from the hospitals to admit patients.” Read More
Michael A. Morse authored “Understanding Whistleblowers: Best Practices for Compliance Professionals” which was published in November Compliance Today, a publication of the Health Care Compliance Association (HCCA).
Reprint permission granted.
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