The largest commercial payer in the U.S. has sued Radiology Partners, claiming the imaging industry giant has perpetrated a “pass through billing scheme” in its “unscrupulous pursuit of profits.”
UnitedHealthcare first filed the claim on April 14 in a California district court, Radiology Business reports. UHC and its local affiliate, UnitedHealthcare of Texas, allege that as early as 2014, Rad Partners engaged in a “classic form of healthcare fraud” by billing for services that its radiologists never performed.
For its part, RP blasted the lawsuit , saying it’s an obvious smokescreen.
“The claims in the United Healthcare complaint are without merit,” Radiology Partners said in a statement. “We believe UHC’s complaint represents an obvious attempt to delay or disrupt the conclusion of an underpayment dispute currently in arbitration involving a Texas-based RP-affiliated practice. We stand by the integrity of RP and our affiliated practices.”
In the complaint, UHC alleges that Rad Partners acted in concert with its medical groups to deliberately cause “thousands of claims” to be improperly billed to the insurer. They would allegedly do so under network contracts, “even though the in-network provider did not perform the underlying services being billed.”
