Craig Patrick was told he wasn't a "team player" when he raised questions about suspected Medicare fraud by his employer, a medical device company called Kyphon Inc., according to an Associated Press report last year. Patrick, who lives in Hudson, Wisconsin, found that someone was willing to listen: the U.S. Justice Department. A lawsuit filed by Patrick and another man under the federal False Claims Act - a law designed to protect and reward insiders who report suspected fraud against the government - cost Kyphon (now owned by Medtronic) $75 million. In May, my colleague Bob Von Sternberg reported that three hospitals associated with HealthEast Care System of St. Paul agreed to pay $2.8 million for overcharging Medicare, while this week, the Justice Department announced that hospitals in Indiana and Alabama would pay $8 million more.

In a news release Tuesday, the Justice Department said the allegations involved a spine surgery called kyphoplasty, that used a kit sold by Kyphon, and contended in the lawsuit that the company "defrauded Medicare by counseling hospital providers to perform kyphoplasty procedures as an in-patient procedure, even though in many cases the minimally-invasive procedure should have been done on an out-patient basis."

For their efforts in helping the government, Patrick and the other former Kyphon employee, Chuck Bates of Alabama, "will receive approximately $1.4 million as their share of the settlement proceeds." That's about a tenth of what they got for the Medtronic -Kyphon settlement last year.