Are Fat Hospital Salaries for Doctors Really Kickbacks?
By Jordan Rau, Kaiser Health News
For a hospital that had once labored to break even, Wheeling Hospital displayed abnormally deep pockets when recruiting doctors.
To lure Dr. Adam Tune, an anesthesiologist from nearby Pittsburgh who specialized in pain management, the Catholic hospital built a clinic for him to run on its campus in Wheeling, West Virginia. It paid Tune as much as $1.2 million a year—well above the salaries of 90 percent of pain management physicians across the nation, the federal government charged in a lawsuit filed this spring.
In addition, Wheeling paid an obstetrician-gynecologist a salary as high as $1.3 million a year, so much that her department bled money, according to a related lawsuit by a whistleblowing executive. The hospital paid a cardiothoracic surgeon $770,000 and let him take 12 weeks off each year even though his cardiac team also routinely ran in the red, that lawsuit said.
Despite the losses from these stratospheric salaries and perks, the recruitment efforts had a golden lining for Wheeling, the government asserts. Specialists in fields like labor and delivery, pain management and cardiology reliably referred patients for tests, procedures and other services Wheeling offered, earning the hospital millions of dollars, the lawsuit said.
The problem, according to the government, is that the efforts run counter to federal self-referral bans and anti-kickback laws that are designed to prevent financial considerations from warping physicians’ clinical decisions. The Stark law prohibits a physician from referring patients for services in which the doctor has a financial interest. The federal anti-kickback statute bars hospitals from paying doctors for referrals. Together, these rules are intended to remove financial incentives that can lead doctors to order up extraneous tests and treatments that increase costs to Medicare and other insurers and expose patients to unnecessary risks.
Wheeling Hospital is contesting the lawsuits. It said in a countersuit against the whistleblower that its generous salaries were not kickbacks but the only way it could provide specialized care to local residents who otherwise would have to travel to other cities for services such as labor and delivery that are best provided near home.
The hospital and its specialists declined requests for interviews. In a statement, Gregg Warren, a hospital spokesman, wrote, “We are confident that, if this case goes to a trial, there will be no evidence of wrongdoing—only proof that Wheeling Hospital offers the Northern Panhandle Community access to superior care, world class physicians and services.”