WASHINGTON, DC – In case you missed it, the Ralph de la Torre saga at Steward Health Care came to a close with his resignation following the U.S. Senate’s decision to charge him with criminal contempt. That has not stopped other hospital systems from making news for all the wrong reasons.
On the heels of their previous investigative story, The New York Times reported that Acadia Healthcare is subject to new batch federal investigations for how they bill patients. The fresh scrutiny is part of a larger push to better understand where hospital systems come up short when it comes to patients and their profits.
Via The New York Times:
Acadia Healthcare, one of the country’s largest chains of for-profit psychiatric hospitals, is facing a fresh round of federal investigations into how the company admits patients and bills for their stay, the company disclosed on Friday.
The company, which operates more than 50 psychiatric hospitals nationwide and gets much of its revenue from government insurance programs, said that federal prosecutors in Manhattan this week requested information from the company and that it also received subpoenas from a federal grand jury in Missouri. Acadia said it expected to receive similar inquiries from the Securities and Exchange Commission.
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The federal investigations followed a recent New York Times investigation that found that Acadia was holding patients against their will in ways that appeared to violate state laws. The Times reported that some patients arrived at emergency rooms seeking routine mental health care but then were sent to Acadia facilities and locked in.
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The news of the federal investigations came a day after the Justice Department announced that Acadia had agreed to pay nearly $20 million to settle claims that it had defrauded government health insurers by holding patients longer than medically necessary and admitting people who didn’t need to be there. Once patients entered its facilities, the government said, Acadia failed to provide therapy and kept staffing dangerously low, leading to assaults and suicides.