Thirteen years after a Mississippi hospital’s former chief operating officer filed a whistleblower lawsuit, a jury has finally returned a verdict. The lawsuit alleged that the hospital’s owner, his wife, and another individual were receiving fraudulent payments from the Medicaid program. However, the jury verdict is not the final event in the proceedings that will put money back into Medicaid’s pocket as well as the pocket of the whistleblower, who has waited a long time to collect his reward.
The jury found that Ted Cain, the owner of Stone County Hospital, cheated Medicare out of nearly eleven million dollars. That same jury found that Cain’s wife Julie had improperly collected just under ten and a half million dollars in Medicare payments. Tommy Kuluz, who served as CEO of Stone County Hospital, was found to have received just under ten million dollars in fraudulent Medicaid payments. The jury also found the hospital and a management company liable for damages.
In addition to recovering Medicaid funds, the lawsuit will involve the collection of damages and fees. The exact amount of damages and fees is unclear at this time because the judge must still hear arguments on the issue of whether to award triple damages. Triple damages are an available remedy provided by the federal whistleblower law under which the case was filed. Under the federal whistleblower law, the man who filed the lawsuit will be paid a reward that is somewhere between fifteen and twenty-five percent of the damages collected in this case.
James Aldridge had only been on the job as the chief operating officer of Stone County Hospital for two months before he filed the lawsuit. The investigation into his claim took over eight years to complete, and it took several more years for prosecutors to bring the case to trial. Some whistleblower cases have a criminal component to them, but this case does not. The aim of this lawsuit is to return money to the Medicaid program and collect the damages and fines assessed by the court.
Tommy Kuluz completed eleven of the twelve Medicare cost reports that were submitted between 2004 and 2015 to reimburse the Cains’ pay. During the trial, jurors learned that at one point, Ted Cain was earning more than a thousand dollars an hour. He and his wife are proud of the millions of dollars’ worth of investments they made in the hospital. Some of those investments came from their pockets and some which were funded by loan guarantees. However, Ted Cain is unable to produce much documentation of exactly what work he did to earn over fifteen million dollars as the CEO of the hospital. Julie Cain worked as the hospital’s administrator during that same time, earning just under two and a half million dollars even though she was not often present at the hospital.
One of the attorneys for the Cains says his clients plan to appeal the case, which he claims was brought by an unhappy former employee. Aldridge’s attorney says that this case is a powerful example of what jury trials can accomplish, restoring payments to a federal program after the program was cheated out of millions of dollars.
When individuals defraud federally funded programs like Medicaid, courageous individuals like James Aldridge can help those programs and the people they serve to get their money back. The Mississippi Whistleblower Protection Attorneys of Barrett Law PLLC support whistleblowers in their efforts to expose every type of fraud. Call us today, at 1 (601) 790-1505, to arrange an initial consultation with the Mississippi Whistleblower attorneys of Barrett Law PLLC.
