Home Health & Hospice Week

Lopez used “a series of meetings and communications to fix wages of nurses,” the feds specify.

“The indictment demonstrates the continued efforts of the Antitrust Division to focus on wage price-fixing and shows the need for every entity, including health care entities, to have up-to-date and effective compliance programs and regular training on those programs,” say attorneys Stephen Libowsky and David Reichenberg with law firm Manatt Phelps & Phillips.

“There is no doubt that the health care industry is under increased scrutiny from the Antitrust Division on multiple fronts and that the Antitrust Division is investigating a wide variety of health industry-related conduct in addition to gathering information through merger investigations,” Libowsky and Reichenberg warn. “All of this … should be more than enough to make persons and entities well aware that what they are doing, what they are writing, whom they are meeting with, and the results they are trying to accomplish are likely to be scrutinized by regulators and others,” they stress.

Meanwhile: A jury has acquitted four Medicaid home health agency owners and managers of wage fixing in Maine. On March 22, a federal jury handed the government a loss in the antitrust case against Faysal Kalayaf Manahe, Yaser Aali, Ammar Alkinani, and Quasim Saesa, according to press reports.

Last year, a grand jury indicted them on charges of participating in a conspiracy to suppress the wages and restrict the job mobility of aides they employed. Kalayaf Manahe, Aali, Alkinani, and Saesa agreed to fix the rates paid to their agencies’ Personal Support Specialist (PSS) workers and to not hire each other’s workers, prosecutors alleged (see more case details in HHHW by AAPC, Vol. XXXI, No. 5).

The government defeat follows two similar losses last year, points out Reuters. A Texas federal jury rejected a wage-fixing case against the former owner of a physical therapy staffing company, and a Colorado jury cleared dialysis provider DaVita Inc. and its former chief executive in a criminal prosecution alleging unlawful restrictions on employee mobility, the news service notes.