UnitedHealth Group says a lawsuit brought by a whistleblower in the Twin Cities that is currently being heard in California should be moved to a court in Washington, D.C.
The Minnetonka-based company made the motion earlier this week in a case that alleges the nation's largest health insurer wrongly received risk adjustment payments for its Medicare Advantage health plans via "one-sided" chart reviews that boosted payment rates while not correcting data errors.
In a court filing Monday, UnitedHealth Group says the dispute is best handled by a court in the District of Columbia because that's the district where the insurance company filed suit last year against the government over the Medicare billing issue raised by the whistleblower.
The Justice Department (DOJ) joined the whistleblower case earlier this year, saying in a May court filing that UnitedHealth Group might have received $1 billion based on inaccurate data.
"This case has strong connections to Washington, D.C.," lawyers for UnitedHealth Group argued in their motion. "For one, if it is transferred there, it may be coordinated with a case in which the arguments are [in DOJ's own words] 'identical' and 'central' arguments that will be raised in this case."
A DOJ spokesman declined to comment.
Benjamin Poehling, a former UnitedHealth Group executive in the Twin Cities, filed the whistleblower lawsuit under seal in 2011. It alleged the company and health plans that hired one of UnitedHealth Group's subsidiaries submitted false information about patient conditions for those covered through Medicare Advantage (MA) plans, which are a private alternative to the traditional Medicare program.
In January 2016, UnitedHealth Group filed a lawsuit against the federal government's Centers for Medicare and Medicaid Services (CMS) challenging a new rule that the insurer says would require MA plans to apply more scrutiny to the accuracy of their risk adjustment data than the government applies to its own.
