Did DaVita Inc. Admit Fraud in Suing a Whistleblower?

File this under ‘What were they thinking?’ Since a fair number of whistleblower cases pop up in the pharmaceutical industry, a recent development concerning a whistleblower and DaVita, the second-largest independent provider of dialysis services in the US, might be of interest. Consider the following… Along with a nurse, a nephrologist and former medical director named Alon Vainer filed a whistleblower lawsuit in 2007 alleging DaVita deliberately wasted medicine in order to gain hundreds of millions of dollars in extra payments from Medicare. They claim DaVita used unnecessarily large vials of different meds because Medicare would pay for unused portions of each vial if these were deemed unavoidable waste. So how has DaVita responded? Besides denying the allegations, the dialysis provider filed its own lawsuit against Vainer. Now, consider the accusations: DaVita charged Vainer breached his contract, caused damages by not alerting DaVita to violations of the law and filed invoices falsely claiming he complied with his agreement, which he could not have done if he did not alert DaVita to any violations of the law. Yes, you read that correctly. It would apppear that DaVita officials are suing the whistleblower for not bringing their own purported fraud to their attention. Consequently, the DaVita team appears to somehow acknowledge that the fraud took place after all, even though they have denied this all along. This prompted an interesting response from the judge hearing the combined cases…