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False Claims Act Update & Alert |
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Taxpayers
Against Fraud Education Fund | Washington, D.C. |
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Taxpayers Against Fraud
Taxpayers Against Fraud is proud to name Tom Cantor as our Whistleblower of the Year for 2009. In a very crowded field, it was Tom Cantor’s persistence and idealism that pushed him over the top. Let’s start at the beginning. Tom Cantor is President and founder of a company called Scantibodies Laboratory, Inc., which make improved assay components to enable the production of sensitive and accurate diagnostic tests for a wide variety of medical conditions. Scantibodies Laboratory is a 100 percent family-owned company, and from its small start in 1976 it has grown to 450 employees on the strength of excellent work that is fairly priced. One of the clinical tests Tom’s company produces is a parathyroid hormone (PTH) test that is used on kidney dialysis patients to measure hormone levels. An accurate test is critical if you are to protect the cardiac and bone health of people suffering from kidney failure. Until 2005, most of the dialysis chains in the U.S. used a parathyroid hormone assay sold by Nichols Diagnostics (NID), a subsidiary of Quest Diagnostics. In 2001, however, Tom discovered that the NID assay test gave faulty and abnormally high results, and as a result dialysis patients were being overdosed with expensive and harmful Vitamin D drugs. Because dialysis clinics make a big profit from these injectible drugs, the faulty NID tests resulted in increased billing to Medicare and Medicaid, more profits for doctors, and a steady and reliable market for NID test kits. Assuming the faulty NID test kit was an honest calibration mistake, Tom brought his test results to the company’s attention. He was rather flabbergasted when NID not only refused to acknowledge the problem, but also took no steps to correct it. Unaware of the existence of the False Claims Act, and thinking all he had to do was tell the truth and show folks the data in order to achieve change, Tom sent thousands of emails to healthcare providers and regulators across the U.S. and overseas, informing them of the problems he had found with the NID test. Tom even went so far as to make private and public presentations of his data and to publish articles in scientific publications. The issue, he noted, was more than money; these faulty tests were compromising the health of thousands. And yet still, no one took action. To understand the heroic nature of Tom Cantor’s undertakings at this point in the story, you need to know that Scantibodies has produced over 1,600 different products over the last three decades. The parathyroid hormone test was only a small part of Tom’s business. He had every reason in the world to ignore NID’s faulty test kit and “play nice” within the industry. His clients were not happy to receive emails telling them they might be complicit in bad medicine and over-billing if they continued to use the NID test kits. Why didn’t Tom just keep quiet? To his infinite credit, however, Tom Cantor did not keep quiet. Taxpayers were being ripped off, lives were being threatened, and unnecessary and painful corrective surgeries were being performed. In the end, Quest Diagnostics decided to fight back against Tom’s information campaign by buying an obscure German parathyroid hormone patent, and then suing Tom, claiming his parathyroid test infringed on their newly acquired patent. It was all bunk, of course, but it was bunk with a purpose. Quest offered to drop their lawsuit provided Tom stopped talking about the defective NID test kit Tom refused, of course, and instead of walking away, he lawyered up and spent $8 million to successfully defend himself against Quest’s bogus charges. Through it all, however, Tom could not get anyone in Government to look into the core fraud he was alleging. Frustrated with his inability to bring attention to the problem, Tom finally searched the Internet and found a new tool he thought might generate a little light: the False Claims Act. What interested Tom about the FCA was not the potential for money, but that filing a False Claims Act lawsuit would finally force the government to investigate the charges he had been making all along. Excellent! To make a long story short, Tom filed his complaint, HHS and the U.S. Department of Justice investigated, and in the end, Quest Diagnostics was forced to shut down their very profitable NID test subsidiary, and pay $302 million to the U.S. Government – the largest settlement ever paid by a medical lab company for a faulty product. Finally – and just to top it all off -- Tom has taken his FCA award money and put it to public service to develop health care therapies for multi-drug resistant Staphylococcus aureus bacterium and other health care therapies. This is the kind of public service spirit we truly and deeply admire at Taxpayers Against Fraud, and why we are so very pleased to name Tom Cantor as our Whistleblower of the Year for 2009.
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